What happens when man forgets is that gods lose their power. But the one true God who has ensured that He will never lose His dominion over man is called Mammon; for Mammon has forged money, so that we will remain forever in His thrall.

In our substantial review of BLACK MONDAY MURDERS VOL 1, so remarkable in its prescience, design and complexity that we made it Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month, I summarised the series glibly yet succinctly as a “big, fat-cat package of occult crime fiction exposing investment banking as a deal with the devil.” You have already met the banking dynasties who have vied for their own power within this domain. Now you will meet the devil.

After multiple warnings and hours of earnest dissuasion Dr. Tyler Gaddis, professor of economics, is going to lead Detective Theodore Dumas to the Capitol of all western capital: the Federal Reserve.

The password is this: “We come to trade.”

What they will discover underneath, hidden in the Abyss down a thousand stone steps, each laid one upon the other against only one wall, is akin to a court in session. Gaddis and Dumas are advised thus:

“The face of god is mighty and terrible. His appetite is eternal. His patience is not.”

What Gaddis offers are Aramaic coins; what they both seek are answers. Detective Dumas wants to know who killed Daniel Rothschild of the Caina-Kankrin Investment Bank. Dr. Gaddis wants to know why his algorithms designed to predict a market crash and mitigate its impact on emerging blue-collar investors don’t always work.

“It should have, but it didn’t. I discovered inconsistencies. Events that fell out of predictable models.”

Soon he will know why, and so will you, and it will all begin to make the most appalling sense.

Mammon’s proclamations, translated from glyphs, are beautifully written with a stark, impassive eloquence and lettered by Rus Wooton for maximum, echoing chills as they emanate from a skull crowned with antlers.

Tomm Coker has exercised enormous restraint during all the conversational pieces in the boardrooms et al, furnishing them with an intensity born of minimal emotional tells until anger erupts and does so, therefore, with a startling impact. The shadows Coker casts are exquisite, while Michael Garland ensures that every page broods, sometimes breeds, and glows.

But now that we’ve gone subterranean, both line and colour artists take full advantage of the opportunity to be gruesome, not with gore, but with that which truly chills. The descent – the steps leading down into darkness which I don’t have for you here – is truly terrifying in that there is only one wall and in that the drops looks eternal. Oh wait, last-minute find: here it is!

The design of the immaculately preserved courtroom / library / throne is gloriously gothic in its architectural sense, while its occupants meet every requirement in its other. In particular, I loved the boutonnière, linen jacket and waistcoat worn by ram-skulled Mammon. and the finery of his silent, spider-masked second, holding the antlered skull aloft by its segmented spine.

“Eternity has two seasons. Day and night. Wake and slumber.
“When I wake, I hunger, and when I hunger, I consume.
“This indulgence upsets the carefully cultivated balance that my schools maintain in this world. The market reacts as I eat – the scales becoming unbalanced – and a correction must be achieved.
“So man pays until my hunger subsides.”

Please don’t think that’s the secret. The secrets lie in the schools.

Please read our review of BLACK MONDAY MURDERS VOL 1 in which I write about the feuding dynasties and their role in our many misfortunes; about the elegance of the art and the hastily photocopied dossier pages which pepper each chapter inviting you to join their dots and do your own detective work within this detective horror fiction. Otherwise I’ll have to repeat myself.

But the two other main threads which weave their way so tightly together here are the wholly unexpected histories of Daniel Rothschild and his former private bodyguard turned Caina-Kankrin security chief… and the return from exile of Daniel Rothschild’s sister Grigoria, initially recalled to take his seat, but now moving swiftly to exact her revenge on her Daniel’s murderer and savage control over Caina-Kankrin in doing so.

Ah, yes, the Rothschilds – now there’s a family that truly consumes. Her normally inscrutable, white-haired femme familiar has quite the appetite too.

But the other seats in Caina-Kankrin will not let Ria wrestle control without resistance, especially Beatrix Bischoff:

“There are tremors in the Market, Ria. Mammon wakes.”
“It sure feels that way, doesn’t it? What are the words?”
“”The sheep cry and scream – there are beasts in the field.””
“Yes. And I am one of them.”

She surely is. I wonder what she was up to while in exile…?

Now, where did we come in?

Ah, yes, “dominion”. If you’re reading this in our illustrated blog, behold the “full” definition as presented with witty redactions. If you’re reading this in the product page, you’ll find it, seven down, to your right.

There’s a poster pinned to the wall in the staff room, sub-titled ‘A Handy Guide For Firefighters’. It’s quite succinct.

“IS IT ON FIRE?”

Below are depicted two houses, identical but for a single salient feature: one them is bursting with flames (√ On Fire), the other is entirely inert (X Not On Fire).

Glad that’s sorted, then. We wouldn’t want to waste water.

Action stations!

Do your young ones dig dinosaurs? Of course they do! They dream of little else! Are fire engines – lights flashing, their sirens NEE-NAR-ing – the most thrilling way to travel? Yes, indeed they are! Preferably through an indoor shopping centre at lunchtime.

Behold, then, this Early Learning heaven which wastes no time in charging straight to the rescue of Snookums the cat, stranded on top of a pre-historic fern, the centre-piece of a quiet, cobbled courtyard on the coast. Dipsy the Diplodocus has just joined the crew and knows what to do!

“Her long neck was just right for reaching up to the top branch,” we are told in letters that travel up her long neck to the branch. Neat! Nimbly, she grabs a giant frond in her mouth, pulling the cat closer. “But…”

Can you tell what well-intentioned Dipsy might have done wrong yet? I might have opted for securing Snookums by the scruff of its neck, myself.

It’s already been visually established that friends and families are sitting relaxed around this piazza, sharing a pizza or drinking a cafetiere of coffee. Someone is selling ice creams. All eyes are on dynamic Dipsy! Over the page, however, the mayor is shown, cutlery poised, about to dig in to an enormous pink pudding, all wobbly and covered in cream. I’ll write that again: all wobbly and covered in cream.

Your eyes cannot help but be drawn to it by the full-page parabolic arch which begins, bottom-left, with Dipsy’s fellow firefighters, eyes wide, mouths gaping agog, all staring diagonally upwards from their lurching red and yellow fire engine; then there is Dipsy herself, long neck also curved round to the right as the frond snaps in two and the fern catapults poor, fluffy Snookums on the same curved trajectory, out towards the reader and the inevitable, jellied destination as the mayor eyes her prize, oblivious.

Both ellipses are invaluable to the comedy. On any second read through I can hear youngsters giggling in anticipation even as early as “But…”, so by the time Snookums is sailing through the air towards its date with the cake they will be squealing, then SPLAT!!

Don’t worry that Dipsy the Diplodocus doesn’t get it right first time round, or even the second time when Trevor the T-Rex gets stuck in the climbing frame… again! The absurdity of that page is a scream. A) What does a T-Rex that large even want with a climbing frame? B) How did such an enormous beast get onto or even into the climbing frame in the first place, let alone then stuck in it and C) … AGAIN?!?!?!?!

Everyone messes up a fair few times at first, but perseverance is everything and Dipsy will remain determined to do her best, quickly discovering that her individual attributes which made her an awkward fit for fire-fighting at first (the standard uniform jacket barely covered her neck – they have to order an XXXXXXXL especially) will be the very things to save the day when a real emergency strikes and the fire engine breaks down.

She might even make up for her mishap with the mayor. I hope so! Because that dry cleaning bill can’t have been cheap.

One of the things I love most about McIntyre’s work is that, along with the exuberant, colourful comedy, she so often has something important to impart to impressionable young minds, digging into her own awkward experiences to do so. With THE NEW NEIGHBOURS it was her insight as an American immigrant to England, so often asked when she’s going back (!), which suggested to her that now would be a very good time indeed to create a picture book about welcoming strangers, appreciating the fresh things their individuality brings to any community, and most emphatically not listening to ill-informed gossip nor spreading it about in the first place!

Now, I’m not sure if you’ve met La McIntyre (she’s so often touring and performing, inspiring young people to create for themselves, so you must!) but she is really rather tall. Amazonian, in fact! And in her online journal she confides that when young she too felt as awkward as Dipsy the Diplodocus when it came to standard-sized kit: https://jabberworks.livejournal.com/803407.html Now Sarah’s stature – and wow factor fashion-wizardry – helps her stand out a mile, drawing excitable kids straight to her. So it is with our pre-historic protagonist, who will discover that her shape and size, while making her feel a little clumsy to begin with, will in fact prove pivotal to saving all and sundry. It’s difficult not to compare yourselves to others, even as adults, but any book that helps improve a vulnerable child’s self-esteem – when we all grow at different rates – is a winner for me!

The forms are truly gorgeous, filling each page to bursting. Dipsy especially can scarcely be contained, doubled over in the confines of the staff room when at her most disheartened. That’s a very clever melding of cause and consequence, of physical discomfort and body-language embarrassment. The eyes there are ever so expressive, the pink flush of her cheeks standing out against her otherwise blue markings as she’s offered a consoling beverage, and that those are so watery makes her stand out from her colleagues.

Although one of her peers on that very same page made me chortle with his horns fanning out like a punk’s egg-white-stiffened hair.

Other random background observations (there really is so much to spot): I loved the traditional cuckoo clock which is given a bone- and Pteranodon-tweak, and that the fashions are a mix of contemporary and quaint (see mayor once more), with transistor radios sitting alongside laptops. I imagine this is the first time I’ve used the word “crockery” in a review, but that’s worth a glance too.

I also adored that the mayor’s Chain of Office appears to be made out of red- and blue-centred Jammy Dodgers, with a final berried biscuit in the middle. Mine would be too! Do you think that’s a vote-winner?

Lastly I’d add that if your young ones love this, then their next step up the Young Readers ladder should be to Gary Northfield’s TERRIBLE TALES OF THE TEENYTINYSAURS which still makes me chuckle and is reviewed. If memory serves (it does so decreasingly) Gary and Sarah shared a studio once, and now they share shelf space. Hooray!

The Best We Could Do s/c (£12-99, Abrams) by Thi Bui.

So often the best route to true understanding lies in the lives of others.

And no one lives solely in their present.

Every individual is coloured by their experiences which have informed their decisions which have in turn brought them to where they are today. It is in these histories that lies the context, and context is everything.

It is not enough to be aware of the bigger picture if you cannot comprehend it, and the best key to comprehension is through the eyes of those individuals who are living it or have lived through it; or those who subsequently died during it.

So it is with those of us looking in from outside; and so it is within families themselves.

“Travis and I moved to California in 2006 to raise our son near family, trading the life we had built and loved in New York for a notion I had in my head of becoming closer to my parents as an adult.
“I don’t know exactly what it looks like, but I recognise what it is not, and now I understand…
“Proximity and closeness are not the same.”

This is a story of parenthood, of childhood, of a generation gap which seemed like a chasm, and if you thought Belle Yang’s search for understanding in FORGET SORROW doubled as a fascinating account of one life in early 20th Century, this is an even more involving and personable account of two separate lives in mid 20th Century Vietnam which eventually and improbably converge. Through this Thi Bui begins to know her parents for who they are in greater depth, and so come to terms with her own strange childhood after the family’s terrifying escape in 1978 from Vietnam via Malaysia to America, then feel far more at ease with her own place within it all.

It is rich in detail and extraordinarily articulate, partly because it is so well structured.

It begins with the excruciatingly difficult birth of her own son which her mother flew all the way from New York to attend but then kept her agonised distance. The following hours in hospital aren’t easy, either, the practicalities of motherhood not coming naturally to Bui. She bonds with her mother over the pain of childbirth, then…

“Ma leaves me, but I’m not alone and a terrifying thought creeps into my head.
“Family is now something I have created, and not just something I was born into.
“The responsibility is immense.
“A wave of empathy for my mother washes over me.”

Bui will return to her own motherhood only towards the end because this is not about that, but all which led up to it.

“My father always said he had no parents. In my twenties, I learned that my grandfather was alive in Vietnam and wanted to meet us.”

Her father refuses to join them. He is adamant. He does not want to see his own father again, but he won’t explain why.

“Soon after that trip back to Vietnam (our first since we escaped in 1978) I began to record our family history, thinking that if I bridged the gap between the past and the present I could fill the void between my parents and me. And that if I could see Vietnam as a real place and not a symbol of something lost, I would see my parents as real people and learn to love them better.”

We will all see her parents as very real people and understand precisely why her father or “Bo” will not return and will have nothing to do with his own father. It is extraordinary, I promise you. You cannot begin to imagine.

Before we delve fully into the structure, I want to talk about the art which is soft and tender, and full of lyrical flourishes like a boat on the sea behind a quiet conversation, lush landscapes and so much more swirling water at one point doubling as a birth. The page just quoted also depicts the tumultuous oceanic crossing, while beneath it a young Thi stands naked, with her back to us, a map of Vietnam carved out of her body where her heart should be, bleeding out of her, up towards the sea or perhaps bleeding down into her to fill that void with fresh understanding.

“How did we get to such a lonely place?
“We live so close to each other and yet feel so far apart.
“I keep looking toward the past…
“Tracing out journey in reverse… over the ocean… through the war, seeking an origin story that will set everything right.”

The first part of this story – her mother’s six baby births – is indeed told in reverse. None of them are easy. The most recent was in the coastal Malaysian refugee camp, another during war; her mother’s firstborn wasn’t stillborn but she didn’t last long, the first parental shadow falling over the proceedings in the form of her own aloof mother’s advice not to breastfeed. Is that where it all began?

“How does one recover from the loss of a child?” she asks as we stroll down a leafy lane. “How do the others compare to the memory of the lost one?”

This triggers memories of Thi’s early childhood in a dark apartment in California, left with her younger brother in the care of her father while her sisters go to school and her mother takes the only job they can get because their degrees aren’t recognised – assembly-line work on minimum wage – which her father refuses.

“That sounds terrible.”

Instead he just sits there smoking, occasionally erupting, while forbidding them to answer the door. Her brother cowers in the closet when anyone comes knocking.

But what happened to her father when he was their age? There will be cowering there too. Cowering on an almost unimaginably dark scale; also our first history lesson, post-WWII – of France’s return to Vietnam to take back what they saw as colonially theirs (perhaps out of pride after being occupied by Germany) – after Ho Chi Minh had declared independence on behalf of the Viet Minh. So begins the geographical divide and the first atrocities…

It is there that we leave him for now, aged seven, with few or no prospects.

“And in the dark apartment in San Diego, I grew up with the terrified boy who became my father.”

This is what I mean by structure: each particular element informs a specific other.

So it is with her mother’s story, which could not be more different and which is brought to bear on Bui’s low self-esteem in comparison to her mother’s beauty. Hers was a much more exotic upbringing, as the youngest daughter of an affluent family and a daddy who doted on her, educated and thriving in French schools. She made friends with an older servant girl who took her to live with her family during the school holidays, sleeping under the moon in the countryside.

But when the servant is married off and so leaves the household, marriage as a trap begins to form in her mind while education represented freedom instead. She aspired to be a doctor. Evidently that didn’t happen, but why? How did she end up married to Thi’s father? Through education, ironically. It wasn’t supposed to be permanent…

Again, the structure is so well judged, Thi Bui seeking to understand her parents thoroughly and independently, before they even met let alone got married and had children. You will see all those births again, this time in the order they occurred, fleshed out as so many dots are joined and – oh! – there was a brief moment before those children when, against all odds, it all seemed so idyllic: teachers with two incomes in a beautiful small town in the deep southern part of the Mekong Delta.

They’d survived the First Indochina War, the Land Reforms – both with catastrophic casualties – but then came the Americans in 1965, destroying Vietnam’s agriculture with their defoliants and its economy with their imports, the descent of cities into police states, and thirteen more years, fully fleshed out for us all to comprehend just how unlikely they were ever to have escaped, and the toll that mere survival took on both of them. You can even spot almost the exact moment of Bui’s father’s collapse from provider to withdrawn brooder while her mother desperately, indefatigably soldiers on, for what other choice is there for a mother?

That’s not the end of the story, obviously, even after the refugee camp and the flight to America.

Once more there’s the question of provision, assimilation, finding your own place in a strange country and foreign climate, re-education after those degrees aren’t recognised, and the painstaking accumulation of fresh documentation both for the family and each of their children separately. It is so very impressive, yet it is humbly titled THE BEST WE COULD DO.

Sarah McIntyre’s all-ages THE NEW NEIGHBOURS wraps its warm heart around the welcoming of strangers, and along with Francesca Sanna’s THE JOURNEY, Sean Tan’s THE ARRIVAL, Kate Evans’s THREADS and Sarah Glidden’s ROLLING BLACKOUTS, THE BEST WE COULD DO is another book with which to bang on the head of anyone tempted to think for even one second that seeking asylum is easy or believe the hate-mongering lies of the right-wing press and politicians that refugees are idle, disrespectful, sponging drains on our resources.

In rebuttal Thi Bui could offer you the nightmare of random raids in a police state and the fear of being disbelieved, the horror of a sea crossing when you could be caught at any second, the generosity of Malaysian villagers with so little to give, the values instilled into their children by Thi Bui’s parents and the sheer hard graft of the mother in order to build something from nothing and set her children up to be educated at length, thrive in peace, and so that one of them could be in a position to write and draw this extraordinary graphic memoir over many years – while teaching in a high school for immigrants in Oakland which she helped create – in order to pass it all on to us for a greater understanding of others.

But, of course, this isn’t a rebuttal. This isn’t a polemic.

This is one woman seeking to gain understanding of herself and her relationship with her parents, in order to relax into parenthood herself.

We’re just lucky enough to be privy to this personal story, and so benefit from it ourselves.

Herding Cats (£9-99, Andrews McMeel Publishing) by Sarah Andersen.

Sarah dispatches her gnawing, pent-up, stress-inducing, self-destructive wrath into the distance with no uncertain force.

“I’M FREE!”

But this is the cleverness in her cartooning: only now do we discover that what she had thrown is in fact a whirling, twirling boomerang.

Three years later: BONK! “That bitch.”

What’s so desperately vital in any book of behavioural one-page comic strips is the crucial recognition factor: do you recognise your own ridiculous yet so often recurring frets and foibles in Sarah’s self-deprecation? For me, they tick every recognition box and I laughed at myself, raucously, right up until the serious section with its warm heart of nurturing gold which we’ll come to in a bit.

If, however, you want to stand out from the masses, you need ingenuity in your presentation, to see what is commonly observed from an unexpected angle. So it is that we come to workload and procrastination. The first is one of the greatest pressures in my life, the second is one of my greatest of very many flaws: putting off something which I know definitely needs doing, all in the vain hope that it doesn’t. What a buffoon! However, we all know that sharing any workload helps enormously, so Andersen’s split herself in two.

“Present me: “So much work…”
“Future me: “That’s okay! If we divide the work equally, neither of us have to –“

In a blur of instantaneous action ‘present’ Andersen on the left SHOVES both enormous stacks of paper in their entirety at ‘future’ Andersen on the right who flails to the floor, buried under their weight. In the fifth and final panel irresponsible Andersen, still in a frenzied blur, scarpers off gleefully, stage-left, leaving future Andersen to “ – suffer”.

Like Andersen’s ADULTHOOD IS A MYTH and BIG MUSHY HAPPY LUMP, the comedy is ever so contemporary, full of failure to care for oneself which ensuring one looks after others, anxieties, self-consciousness and self-doubt. It would serve anyone very well who’s looking for more Allie Brosh (HYPERBOLE AND A HALF). Yes, as the purple fur-trimmed cover suggests, there are many, many preferential-treatment cat comics to coo over too, but this is the Age of the Internet and social media with all its abundant resources and so many of its flaming consequences.

“Today’s question!” reads Sarah. “Will people on the Internet argue about anything?”
“YES!” bellows a furious crowd, startling Sarah to her left.
“NO!” screams an indignant, antagonised anger mob to her right.

As you can imagine, what follows is pitchforks at dawn, and they won’t stop waving even after dusk.

Which is funny! But there’s a darkness discerned too, which Andersen explores in the now traditional extended essay in the back. When Andersen was starting out the accessibility of the internet made it an invaluable vehicle and venue in which to post her comics, gain a following, and grow in craft, confidence and stature. But now nascent artists beginning to explore and hone their creative talents online can be subject to thoughtlessly (or even maliciously) harsh criticism and even outright bullying with seriously deleterious consequences to their self-confidence. Unlike a spider’s this web wasn’t designed as a trap but that, to those vulnerable, is what it can become.

“It turns out, when you give people endless access to a shroud of anonymity and a soapbox, the results might just be disastrous. Whereas users congregated in small pockets before, social media has enable the rise of mass movements that use trolling as a deflection tool for “doing the most damage I can do and then saying it was just a joke.”

There are plenty of comics – all new, I think – to illustrate her arguments, but Sarah also offers encouraging ways in which to survive criticism which, when offered constructively, is an essential part of self-improvement. And it’s difficult to take even when couched with kindness:

WHAT THEY SAID:
“Good thing, good thing, good thing….
“Bad thing. BUT! Good thing, good thing.”

WHAT YOU HEARD:
“…………………………………
“Bad thing! Only bad thing. YOU are a bad thing.”

Sarah’s suggestions are practical, understanding and supportive, eventually concluding with: do for goodness sake take breaks in the real world, but don’t let the idiots win – keep creating!

What other topics has Andersen taken up this time? Childhood heroes, doomed to disappoint or disgust you. Self-destructive fandom in-fighting… Ah yes, resolutions: “I will set my alarm for 7:30. And I will wake up at 7:30! No snooze!” Then you sleep blissfully, optimistically in YOUR BED OF LIES.

Now picture this: you’ve just made the mistake in a shop of holding a folded shirt up against you to see if it will fit or perhaps you’ve tried it on… and then you have to fold it back up with store assistants watching and it’s impossible, it won’t match the others whatever you do!

“You ruined it.” You begin sweating self-consciously, eyes darting about as all the other shirts start to unravel, turning into big, mushy, unhappy lumps. “You ruined everything.” Now the entire department is on fire… “How?? How did you mess up this badly? “Oh God I’m sorry.””

Yup, that’s me. Again, I cannot emphasise how much the lateral thinking – of the other shirts unfolding and the clothes store igniting – is vital in its hyperbole to the humour. Below, it’s about the timing. One panel only devoted to merrily holding forth with friends in a pub…

“Contrary to popular belief, being introverted is not about your ability to socialise.”

… a single panel leaving, contentedly…

“It’s about what you do after.”

Three whole panels curled up in a cocoon on your bed or sofa, mind-whirring, paralyzed.

Hard Core Pawn #1 (£4-00, A Heavy Manners Comic) by Steve Lowes…

“I am grateful I live in a democracy where my vote is equal to that of the next persons and that my opinion really counts…”
“… For fuck all. The masters of mankind must maintain an illusion of democracy to remain in control. Thus the need to impose democracy upon those not yet within our power.”

He has a point regarding the illusion of democracy, if you stop and think about it. Well, two to be precise: the illusion of democracy, and the need of those in control to impose it upon others, elsewhere.

Facts that perhaps more and more people are waking up to. Or “getting woke”, as the kids with their annoyingly grammatically inaccurate ways are currently wont to say.

What makes this exchange so striking is that the first statement is from one chess piece, a black pawn, putting a ballot paper into a ballet box, whilst the second, coming from a white king, has shredded paper going directly into a waste bin.

All the characters in the various strips in this work – be they based on existing songs and poems such as ‘Strange Fruit’ made famous by Billie Holiday plus also some original material written by the creator – are chess pieces, frequently pawns and kings, hence the title, HARD CORE PAWN.

The strips cover a range of pertinent hot topics such as capitalism, gender politics, racism and terrorism, always presented from that black and white gaming-piece perspective. As conceits go, it certainly allows Steve to concentrate on the punchlines, which are hard-hitting and occasionally outrageously amusing.

Art-wise, as you’d imagine, it’s not too testing to draw chess pieces, but that’s not the point. It allows us all to very easily slip into the position of the pieces.

My favourite strip was probably ‘Alcocapitalism’ in which Steve charts the rise of alcohol consumption and its subsequent impact on the global economic structure. The punchline there, a slightly reworked reprise of a repeated beat throughout, had me howling. It just goes perfectly to show that politics and farce go hand-in-hand, but we all knew that right?

“Throughout childhood people tell you to be less sensitive.
“Adulthood begins the moment someone tells you, “You need to be more sensitive”.”

I swear on my psychotherapy couch that you do not need to have read the original prose novel to relish this original comic actually written – not suggested – by Chuck Palahnuik himself. I read the book many moons ago but can barely remember a word.

I seem to recall it was at least partially about smashing the system: rising in up in rebellion against corporate conditioning, financial finagling, governmental authoritarianism and the pervasive mediocrity we can obliviously settle for during our everyday, oh-so-short lives; about waking up from the ubiquitous mass hypnotism of messed-up humanity… whilst enthusiastically submitting to someone else’s indoctrination. If it wasn’t, it should have been.

“Terrorism. Communication. Authorative anti-authoritarianism. One man’s enlightenment is the same man’s indoctrination. Stop being a sheep, and be part of my flock instead!”

The cult of personality, eh? Unless it’s mine, I’m always suspicious.

As I said, however, Fight Club could have been about something else entirely, like hitting people. I imagine that’s why many went to see the film.

Fight Club 2 begins with a similarly iconoclastic personal survey in which you can discover, “Are You Space Monkey Material?” It poses 12 questions with mirth-inducing optional answers. Let’s try a few.

By the end of the first issue-worth of material Tyler may just have done that, but in the meantime Marla’s begun to take evasive manoeuvres of her own and Sebastian is swallowing them whole. Chic and suited, she’s quite the self-obsessed piece of work, invading a counselling session for those with Hutchinson Gilford Progeria Syndrome (such rapid aging that 10-year-olds appear to be 60) while complaining about her wrinkles – “They’re all on the inside!”

Chain-smoking throughout, she’s drawn by Cameron Stewart with a superb sense of insouciance that puts me in mind of Mrs Quinn, the rich bitch in Nabiel Kanan’s THE DROWNERS, though there’s more than a touch of Sean Murphy in her angular face.

My favourite pages are those on which pills or petals – rendered to striking contrast with three-dimensional modelling complete with shadows which fall over the panels beneath them – are imposed over what is being said by the narrator or the narrative’s participants. Whereas the dog’s barking merely drowns thoughts out like ASTERIOS POLYP talking over his girlfriend, the effect here is different because you can discern what lies below – with the romantic rose petals at least – suggesting that the bunch of flowers Sebastian has bought his missus is merely a smoke screen hiding the lie of their messed-up marriage.

“Happy Annive -”
“I lo – you -”
“Take your pill.”

There’s no hiding that last line.

Sebastian, meanwhile, is the epitome not so much of exhausted but sedated. Everyone’s more got more life in them than he has. Even his neighbour.

“Studies conducted by the United States Military prove that what women fear most is physical pain… What men fear most is being humiliated, losing social status, public ridicule.”

Sebastian used to be a fighter once, but he’s fallen asleep. Now it’s time to wake up.

I think I can hear alarm bells ringing.

What you should now be asking yourself, is just who set off said alarm…?

Aficionados of Fight Club, the prose work that is, will absolutely devour this. It does everything they will have ever craved for in a sequel, which they probably never actually expected to happen, and so much more besides. They will learn who Tyler Durden truly is. Chuck Palahniuk will speak to them, and his characters, directly. No really, and their worlds will crumble into dust and ashes around their ears. Okay, maybe not that last bit, at least not for the readers, but I genuinely didn’t see where this was going until the big reveal and even then, armed with that particular piece of knowledge, I couldn’t see precisely how it would all end.

As exquisitely complex and tortuously dark as the original, I sincerely hope this encourages more prose literary figures to try their hand at comics writing (as William Gibson has just done with the excellent ARCHANGEL). I’m not sure I want a sudden raft of sequels to prose works in comics form, I think there are more than enough sequels generally already thank you, but given the original work was such a distinctive, vicious piece of satire regarding the culture of consumerism and the decay of Western civilisation, that has been proven so acutely accurate in the interim since its release, I think Chuck deserved his opportunity to play Tyler’s story out to its ultimate, nasty unavoidable end-game. In other words: FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT! The nagging question though, is what exactly is Tyler fighting for?

I have to say, I’ve missed you, buddy. Nobody but nobody writes Frank Castle better than Garth Ennis and the character is never better than when removed from the chaffing restrictions of the capes-and-tights milieu and placed squarely smack bang into a real world of pain.

“FIX BAYONETS!”
…
“And that is not an order you ever expect to hear. But that was the thing. He had the instinct for it.
“The rest of us knew how to survive, but at the end of the day we were civilians in uniform. A bunch of conscripts, getting short, waiting to go home… which we knew we’d do without a backward glance.
“He’d been in-country a week, but he just knew without having to be told. Him and Dryden.
“There was only one answer to this.
“And not just violence. That’s too simple a word, it doesn’t cover it.
“This was something else, this was forgetting everything else you’d ever been taught about the very idea of civilisation…
“You had to…kind of let the devil in the door.”

The surviving members – well, all except one – of Fourth Platoon, Kilo Company, Third Battalion of the Twenty-Sixth Marine regiment have gathered in a bar at the behest of writer Michael Goodwin, whose book ‘Valley Forge, Valley Forge’ about the massacre of an entire Marine firebase and the subsequent creation of the Punisher following the loss of his family in Central Park won Goodwin several plaudits. He’s interested in interviewing them about their recollections of their absent comrade, their former commander, one Second Lieutenant Frank Castle…

So, just in case you were in any doubt, we are well and truly back in the brutal world of PUNISHER MAX, and indeed back in ‘Nam, the veritable world of pain I was just referring to.

So what angle is Michael Goodwin taking this time?

“I guess I was thinking about the innocence we had about ourselves: I’m of that generation too, remember, I was just too young for the draft. But that isn’t… Okay, I wrote a book about Firebase Valley Forge and the Punisher. Castle sees his family killed in front of him, and I don’t think it’s hard to find the roots of what he does next in that third duty of duty.
“But what about his first tour? The one he returns from at the end of ’68 and nothing else happens? The one where – just maybe – he still has a chance.
“You see, it’s not just about the war and what was lost to it. It’s not just about the country, either. It’s about the guys who came home. Well, he came home from his time in Vietnam, the time that changes everything about America. He had a life before the Punisher, and I’ve been thinking about this ever since my book… I…
“The way I see it, all I did was write the ending.
“I never wrote the story.”

He has, though, (thank you Garth!) just pretty much written my review for me. I wouldn’t normally quote so much from a comic, but I think it’s important for you to understand, if you are not already familiar with Garth’s PUNISHER MAX material, that this is not a superhero comic. It’s a war comic, and more importantly – as in the tradition of the very best war comics – it has something important to say about the profound impact combat inevitably has on the people who go through it. Even a fictional character like Frank Castle. How they are changed. For one cannot go through the horrors of war without being transformed. For some it’s only a little, perhaps a shifting they can learn to live with, in time. For others… there is really no way back home ever again. Not in the emotional sense, certainly. Some… well, some perhaps find what they’ve been searching for all along…

This work is a perfect coda to the Vietnam-based elements, ‘Born’ now found in PUNISHER MAX VOL 1 and ‘Valley Forge, Valley Forge’ now found in PUNISHER MAX VOL 4. Yes, technically it’s a prequel, but it both informs and is informed by those two arcs which bookended Garth’s extended run. Here he’s teamed up once again with Goran STARLIGHT Parlov who illustrated several PUNISHER MAX arcs including the utterly hilarious one starring the demented and depraved lunatic, the Barracuda. There is also plenty of black comedy to be had here.

Parlov brings an angular steeliness to young Frank, whilst still giving him the appearance of a young blue-eyed inexperienced man, almost movie star-like in his statuesque and resolute handsomeness, having not yet been exposed to the tempestuous weathering of war. That comes soon enough, though, as Frank’s platoon, stuck in a forward position with insufficient firepower and some serious bad country to deal with, rapidly begin to realise that whilst the new LT might be a rookie, he certainly isn’t green.

Very different from Christopher Priest’s sly, winking socio-political approach to BLACK PANTHER, this is more geo-political but just as sassy and sharp.

Quality art from John Romita Jr. depicts one specific instance from the history of Wakanda – the African nation ruled by the Black Panther – oh so elegantly illustrating why it was the only such country that has never been invaded by another.

As Reginald Hudlin has written elsewhere, it has been firmly established that African humans were far more advanced far earlier than their European counterparts, so it stands to reason that if one nation had continued to develop unimpeded then they would have the technology to defend themselves against European imperialism without even breaking a sweat.

There’s an immensely satisfying sequence in which one such arrogant, nineteenth-century would-be conqueror, devoid of any humanity whatsoever, is humiliated then dispatched. The Wakandan chief is the epitome of fearlessness and strength: a warrior of few words which, when delivered, are no idle threats.

Cut to the present and Wakanda has reacted to America’s current, Iraq-invading neo-imperialism by declaring a no-fly zone over their country.

So, how do you like them apples?

“There is no way a bunch of waffle-makers are going to play us out of position in Wakanda! We need to send in support troops to aid our Wakandan allies right away!”
“And where are those troops coming from? Our troops are spread too thin already. We just don’t have enough bodies.”
“Oh, that’s the one thing we have plenty of.”

Ouch!

“We’ve got more than enough bodies to inva — I mean, assist Wakanda!”

Standing in front of row upon row of coffins, each laid out under the Stars & Stripes flag on a U.S. Aircraft Carrier off the African Coast:

“I think it’s time you found out what kind of special cargo we’ve got on this ship. These brave men and women died for their country. All that training and manpower wasted. The military hates waste.”

This contains the first story arc of the politically pointed 2005 series before it all went unnecessarily tits-up during a crowbarred-in crossover with The X-Men and readers fled faster than stoats from a boat that’s been set on fire.

Boats are infested with stoats. It’s a modern epidemic. True fact!

Hmmm…. A vastly extended version of Reggie Hudlin and John Romita Jr’s WHO IS THE BLACK PANTHER (which is where my review, above, comes from) this collects BLACK PANTHER (2005) #1-18 and X-MEN (1991) #175-176 so, yes, that crossover I much maligned. Of those subsequent issues Marvel kindly informs us:

“Then, social satire meets all-out action as T’Challa’s adventures continue! The Panther enters the HOUSE OF M! An outbreak of strange, mutated animals brings Storm and the X-Men to Africa! The Panther teams up with Luke Cage, Blade, Brother Voodoo and Monica Rambeau to take on the undead! But every king needs a queen, and so T’Challa embarks on his most dangerous quest yet: to wed the love of his life! Which of the world’s greatest super hero women will say ‘I do’?”

Out In The Open h/c (£14-99, SelfMadeHero) by Javi Rey, based on the novel by Jesύs Carrasco.

“He sharpened his senses, searching for the voice that had forced him to flee.”

A boy lies cowering in a dark burrow amongst the roots of the olive grove, one arm on the dusty earth, the other clasped protectively around his own torso. He is as still and as silent as possible; but you can almost feel him shivering in the suffocating heat as he strains to hear the one sound that he so desperately never wants to again.

His eyes are wide, black dots of terror.

And they stay like that for hours, until the sun finally sets.

This is a beautiful book full of soft pinks and bruise-purple shadows upon bright, straw-coloured, grass plains and arid desert. Craggy outcrops appear in the distance. Under the succour of rare, sparsely leafed tree, there are dappled shadows which I doubt could afford much relief from the noon-day heat, but it must be some comfort, some sanctuary.

Where the boy escaped from there was no sanctuary, not even at home. But there were worse things than his father’s beatings. There was the sheriff. And what would a sheriff want with a young boy like him?

Yes, it’s a beautiful book full of vistas and sunsets, and the surprise of a sunrise when you were convinced you’d never make it… But it is devastating.

The prologue speaks of promise lost.

“There was a time when that plain was a sea of grain. On windy spring days, the wheat undulated just like the surface of the ocean. Green and fragrant waves awaiting the summer sun. The same sun that now baked the clay, pulverising it until it turned into dust.”

What was once wholesome and full of potential to sustain and nurture life has now been drained of it by the sun which should also be life-giving but in this instance proved otherwise. In the cameo panel above, what was once a sea of green or golden wheat has now been survived by desiccated, sharp, brown needles.

It’s based on a novel of prose from a Spanish writer called Jesύs Carrasco. ‘Novel’, I’m told, not ‘novella’, nor three-page short story, but if you did away with all the art and lined up the prose here, then it probably wouldn’t fill many more pages than four. So yes: very much “based on”, no mere “adaptation”.

The images are profoundly communicative, not just of the radiating heat round the small fire of a temporary camp site when the night must be freezing, but of fear and of wariness. The boy’s arms are once more clasped protectively, this time round his knees and not just for the cold: the goatherd seems kindly enough, but trust will not come easily to the boy, ever again.

There too the colours do so much of the work: salmon pink for the glow and the warmth of the crackling fire on flesh and clothing, while the night is slate blue.

The solitary, wizened goatherd who has little of his own intuitively understands at least some of the plight of the young boy who initially hovers round the camp site. Even after the kid attempts to steal the old man’s satchel, he is invited to share food and the comfort of the fire. But, as I say, trust will never be offered or earned easily again, even through guileless kindness. Ulterior motives have been this boy’s experience.

I’m afraid that you’re shown those in memories more like dream sequences when a chillingly cold blue drifts in.

When the sheriff first appears he does so as a prancing dandy smoking a cigarette, precise features eroded to a jauntily hat–topped, yellow-eyed, satanic-red grinning skull. He seems perfectly pleased with himself.

In some ways this reminded me of Craig Thompson’s HABIBI. Not stylistically in the slightest, but in that it is also a tale of survival, endurance and provision for others in the wake of man’s inhumanity to man. Provision for others is so often offered by those who have least. The goatherd offers the boy what little he has in the way of protection and nutrition; but the goats are themselves parched and so produce little milk.

Ismyre (£8-99, Avery Hill) by B. Mure.

“So what’s the next step in your master plan?”
“Genius never tells. Or sleeps. But snacks are very important.”

Agreed!

Also important are colours, and you’re in for an eye-full!

This charming, fantastical, anthropomorphic mystery and call to floral arms bursts with warmth and spectacle, along with a delightfully daft political powder keg waiting to explode.

The Prime Minister of an old, rustic European country is planning a grand event to celebrate ushering in a new age of prosperity (for the already wealthy, at least), and is determined to have an ice sculpture as its centre-piece, carved by one Edward Goodwill. Unfortunately, in its run-up, citizens are going missing and a cell of masked Eco Anarchists has embarked on a campaign of urban vegetation detonations. The Prime Minister is convinced that the two are not unrelated.

Edward Goodwill, meanwhile, one of her best-selling sculptors, discovers that it’s not only people who are disappearing. The sculptor’s decorated wooden figurines are vanishing too. Edward takes to a bar to ponder both the puzzle and the Prime Minister’s commission in private, only to be befriended by a fox called Faustine who is self-assured, extremely assertive and exceedingly resourceful. She is determined to get to the bottom of the twin mysteries, help a faltering Goodwill complete his governmental commission, then perhaps have a right old cackle into the bargain.

Good golly but the pages vibrate with light and colour, right off the electromagnetic spectrum.

The colour, washed over such delicate thin and crisp lines, provides so much depth and energy that you won’t even notice the eschewing of spot-blacks or textures.

We begin with an essay in aqueous blue and lemon yellow for an opening page of nocturnal tranquillity, harmony and indeed melody as Edward’s widower neighbour, on the opposite side of the street, sings to herself about love. Edward decides to call it a day, and pops a work in progress onto the shelves only to discover that another one’s gone missing. Cleverly, there, red is first introduced.

Bathed in blue, Goodwill falls sound asleep as we pan up above the city to see a silent, paved, solitary street with one particularly grandiose house with its equally ornate facade jutting out from its peers, and so focussing our attention upon it. Yellow and red washes re-emerge quietly, so quietly, shhhh….

Then BOOOOOOOM!

That’s going to take some pruning.

But back to Faustine the fox, and her cunning plan to solve all of the city’s mysteries in one fell swoop:

“After Charlottesville, tons of Confederate monuments have come down around the country – but we still have the largest monument to white-supremacy in the country: the presidency of Donald Trump.”

Vastly expanded hardcover edition of the former pamphlet – which was potent enough in its own right – this is ten times as long, with a far wider remit.

Within, Ben Passmore observes an America in which vocal, overt, organised racism – with its attendant intimidating, gun-toting marches further radicalising the easily brainwashed into acts of murderous terrorism – has been “legitimised” by Trump’s refusal to decry it as criminal, instead embracing some of its thugs as “decent folks”. Instead, it’s the Antifascists who are cast as violent while the Klan classes itself as the oppressed underdogs under attack. “There’s a war on whiteness!” screams one boss-eyed white-supremacist woman.

In the wake of which, Passmore also assesses the state of counter-racist political activism in the form of protests, and finds it lacking and inadequate to the task. “”Freedom of Speech” isn’t worth much if it facilitates inactivity.” Of Trump he goes on to say, “If the fight to remove racists made of stone and metal is any indication, we will have to use just as diverse tactics to overcome the real one.”

“The spirit of this collection of comics,” he writes, “is more a reflection of ideas… about how to be dangerous, how to be a failure, and how to laugh in the face of a world that wants to crush us… And we all fail, homies, it’s okay. We just have to learn how to fail upward.”

Personally I like it best when Passmore addresses us directly about politics and social politics, with a clarity, conviction and eloquence that is infectious. Partly because some of the more surreal stuff I simply didn’t understand.

However, I did gross out mightily at the ‘OK Stoopd!” hook-up featuring a feckless, defeatist, cannibalistic chicken, gobbling drumsticks from a bucket as grease drools from its quivering gullet. The cat asks:

“I gotta ask… you’re chicken, which is solid, but isn’t it weird to be like eating chicken?”
“These CAGE MONKEYS!? I was smart enough ta stay outta the fryer! It’s their own lazy-ass faults! CAGE MONKEYS!”

So I don’t suppose the chicken will be joining the protests.

I also laughed heartily at the Hand of God chatting to Jesus:

“Why doesn’t anyone want to hang-out with us?”
“Cause you do weird shit.”

The Hand of God does indeed do weird shit; right on the page, too.

The autobiographical ‘Ally I Need is Love’ from Passmore’s time as a pedicab driver includes two glorious caricatures when he picks up a “tomb-faced” old white lady with an imploded head and a “tween smoke cloud”. It doesn’t matter how fast he pedals, that thick cigarette smoke encircling the girl’s head – like clouds round a mountain – is not going to be blown away.

Instead, it is Ben who is blown away when the old woman tries to pick him up, persistently, eventually coming out with…

“It’s just that itz my birthday and I haven’t been with a black man in so long…”
“THA WHAT? Get off my cab!!!”

But what happens next is as profoundly moving as it is unexpected. (I’m not sure we can entirely trust the final panel, but it is the most perfect and passionate punchline, rendered with love).

Basically, this: just because Passmore is laudably and necessarily blunt and uncompromising in his politics, please don’t presume that he is either self-righteously self-satisfied or humourless. Above all, however, he exhorts: “Stay dangerous”.

So back to ‘Your Black Friend’ which I originally reviewed thus:

A densely worded eleven-page opportunity to listen to a fresh perspective we’d all do well to see the world from, lest we assume that we all experience it the same way.

Your titular black friend has much on his mind from his extensive experience of being your black friend. He has plenty to say about that experience and he does so with commendable clarity, directness and level-headed balance; but he’s not about to waste what little space he has by mincing his words, either.

He’s going to say what he means and mean what he says.

The comic is bookended by your black friend “sitting in a coffee shop, your favourite coffee shop”, eating a sandwich he’s bought elsewhere “hoping that white guilt will keep the barista from confrontin’ him about.”

Let’s see if that will work in his favour. Let’s see if anything does, frankly.

“Your black friend listens to a conversation between a nicely dressed white woman and the barista.”

The nicely dressed white woman is boasting about her speed in calling the cops after seeing a “sketchy guy” coming out of a backyard with a bike. The barista asks the nicely dressed white woman to describe the man.

“I dunno… black, tall, dreads, the bike was a 98 Gary Fisher w/ a big marlin on it, drop bars, disc breaks, a broken spoke and one of those Brookes racing saddles instead of the factory seat.”

The nicely dressed white woman is curiously well informed, but no matter.

“Was that house on France Street? Did he have a big nose ring?”
“Yeah…”
“That sounds like Darren, he comes here all the time. That’s his house. That’s his bike.”

The barista, beautifully drawn to be of a certain age yet far from behind the times, is shown to be more than a little alarmed. You could add exclamation marks to her protests.

However, this is what I mean by the calm clarity and level-headedness which runs like a vein or hallmark right through Passmore’s many cultural and social observations exemplified by his own interactions:

“This is an important moment, your black friend has seen this many times: a white person unaware of their racism, blunders into a moment in which it is undeniable. He knows that this woman still will not see it, she is both afraid of black people and the realization of that fear. It will take the barista, seeming race savvy and familiar to the rich lady, to clarify what has just happened. But, your black friend knows the barista will say nothing. What white ppl fear most is “making things awkward”.”

It gets better.

“Your black friend would like to say something but doesn’t want to appear “angry”. He knows this type of person expects that from him and he will lose before he begins. This’ why he has white friends, he thinks. White ppl are allowed to be “angry” when he is expected to be calm and reasonable. He wishes he could make you understand this, and many other things…
“For example: your black friend wishes you understood why he hates it when the barista calls him “baby” like she is his “auntie”, or any other black woman over the age of 50.”

He has a damn good go at providing illumination during the nine packed pages that follow, in which he recounts numerous examples of feeling uncomfortable on both sides of the racial divide, even managing to fall through the cracks of fitting in when that division is narrowed. I liked this:

“Your black friend’s black friends tell him that black-owned businesses will end racism but your black friend is sceptical that scented afro picks can be utilized as a political apparatus.”

So will our black friend speak up in the coffee shop, do you think?

This comes with an exceptionally well timed ending, every element of which is set up right at the beginning.

I Love This Part h/c (£12-99, Avery Hill) by Tilly Walden.

Two girls share experiences, confide in each other and reassure each other gently.

They explore landscapes together, looking out, over or nestling within them. This is the sweet languor of youth when you still have time to rest supine and stare at the sky up above you.

There’s an intimacy right from the start in the way they inhabit those landscapes, absorbing a song, one ear-bud each, or crouched under a duvet in front of a laptop with a night-time cityscape rising behind them, its tiny, square, skyscraper windows brightly lit while their monumental silhouettes stand out, crisp and bold, against white and purple-tinged clouds.

“I got an ipod Shuffle once for Hanukkah and it really stressed me out that I never knew what song was next.”

That made me smile. It’s true, isn’t it, that we enjoy the segue from one song to another on an album we love, subconsciously anticipating what we know will come next as the final chords on the current one fade or when it concludes in a blistering crescendo? It’s the same with any mix-tape you’ve made.

So here’s the thing: the story is told in single-panel pages and if the landscapes are so often majestic – mountains, canyons, valleys – then the two girls are equally epic and so completely at one with them.

Their positioning is perfect and the sense of scale is breathtaking. Tillie Walden already demonstrated an adoration of Windsor McCay’s LITTLE NEMO in THE END OF SUMMER; here she takes that influence and makes of it something uniquely her own. Winsor thought like this, but he never did this. There’s also that dreamlike comfort to it. Or at least there is to begin with.

Initially each full-page panel features both girls in synch, either side by side or opposite each other, but then there’s a brief falling-out over a photo uploaded onto social media without the expressed consent of the other. It’s still gentle and the kindness – the reassurance – remains. But there follows a telling page in which they’re no longer completely as one but staring in different directions and, oh, the art is exquisite as one girl’s swimsuit hugs tight while the other’s dress billows carefree in a breeze.

Gradually there encroach pages in which only one or neither girl features, silence falls and texting begins instead.

Never forever, I promise you, for this is far from linear but it’s in marked contrast to what went before when their relationship morphs as they tentatively explores new territories, not necessarily successfully.

Aaaaaand we’re still only a fraction of a way in.

The comic’s not long but it’s still substantial, begging you to linger and rewarding you if you do.

It’s fiercely well observed with incredible understanding and empathy but without demanding you recognise that, for so much is left to be said by the silences. I’m in awe of that confidence. And if it isn’t confidence then it’s one massive leap of faith in an approach which is an unequivocal success.

I could type ten more paragraphs precisely proving in which ways Walden has achieved that – I honestly could – but I’m here to intrigue you to discover the rest for yourselves rather present evidence for my assertions once again for the university examining board.

Since the original softcover of I LOVE THIS PART, Tillie went on to produce A CITY INSIDE which includes one of the most romantic lines ever written:

“You gave up the sky for her.”

Then, aged all of 21, she produced the autobiographical SPINNING, one of Page 45’s fastest-selling graphic memoirs of all time, which provides a personal context to I LOVE THIS PART and, most unexpectedly, an answer to what happened next.

LAZARUS is one of my favourite current comic series: gripping intrigue, balletic action and phenomenally intelligent extrapolation from recent scientific developments, as well as a thorough exploration of the socio-political ramifications of a societal reversal. Each of the first four volumes is reviewed, including the two-in-one hardcovers, with attention to regular artist Michael Lark who here provides the cover.

Spoiler-free summary, for it’s important to what follows:

In the far from distance future the world’s economies didn’t just collapse, they imploded, taking all nation states with them.

The entire globe has reverted to a feudal society ruled by 16 Families: the Families with the most money, because money buys people, money buys science and money buys guns.

Underneath them lies a slim stratum of society with key skills vital for the Families’ prosperity and hegemony. These Serfs are richly rewarded, their needs taken care of. Everyone else is Waste.

All Families have a Lazarus, each augmented by differing means according to the individual Family’s scientific resources, to the extent that – although they cannot rise from the dead – their bodies can withstand and recover from the most brutal physical punishments. They are then rigorously trained to become the Families’ bodyguards, military commanders and ultimate assassins.

In the Carlyle Family’s case it is their youngest daughter, Forever. Ever since she can remember she has been told, “Family Above All”. And by ‘told’, I mean ‘indoctrinated’. And by ‘indoctrinated’, I mean lied to.

LAZARUS: X PLUS 66 is a book about loyalty. It’s about loyalty within families, but above all loyalty to The Family in whose domain you are permitted to reside. Those loyalties will all be sorely tested.

X Plus 66 is a year. It’s the year immediately following LAZARUS VOL 5, marking just over six and a half decades since the Families met in Macau to carve up the world and its riches between themselves. To give Michael Lark a well earned breather, the collection’s comprised of six short stories drawn by different artists, each of which picks up on ancillary – but by no means peripheral – characters and their fortunes which there would have been little room to have covered within the central series. In doing so, it provides a wealth of extra flesh on the main body’s bone, so I would urge you not to skip it.

There are some superb neologisms for new scientific research and development, like “sleeving”: the ability to slot an archived personality, complete with its memories, from one Lazarus into its successor. Not yet possible, but they’ve achieved the next best thing with Sir Thomas Huston of the Armitage Family taking advantage of all his predecessor’s internally recorded and externally archived experiences.

“As experience is the best teacher, each new Sir Thomas benefits from the life of the last.”

I think you’ll especially want to learn the fate that befalls the Morray Family’s Lazarus, Joacquim Morray, given the horrifying swerve in his fate last volume. You’ll also discover exactly what relation he is within the Morray Family Tree. This has no small bearing on his past, present and dubious future. Mack Chater (BRIGGS LAND) draws a halting first-page panel which could not have present Joacquim as more vulnerable, his shaved pubic area making it all the more clinical.

Tristan Jones gives the grizzliest chapter the grizzliest of dirty, detailed texture set in The Dragon’s lair (The Dragon is the least pleasant Lazarus of the lot – I mean, bwwaaaaar). He’s holed away in a remote, claustrophobically dark subterranean bunker with mauled dolls dangling from chains. Unnervingly, there’s also one in a rib cage directly outside the entrance to the snow-swept cave entrance and more with cameras for eyes inside.

Surprising, then, that there’s a fine piece of painted portraiture framed on a wall. All to do with his upbringing, as you shall see…

The media’s plight under feudal control is examined, and the lives of some of those newly elevated from Waste to Serfdom is shown with an extra vantage over a shanty town of those left behind, drawn by Justin Greenwood. You may want to smack one mother.

Lastly, I do know why the elite army training episode comes first, in order to re-introduce and re-emphasise the main theme – loyalty and Family Above All – but it isn’t in all honesty quite as gripping as the rest, so do please soldier on.

They’re lost many times in many times, each volume shooting them into their own future or far into our past – very far, in one instance.

If you love the idiosyncrasies of any era – obsessions, slang, popular culture, outdated technology and lack of technology we now take for granted – then you will lovePAPER GIRLS. Cliff Chiang has done an enormous amount of research and the temporal locations are immediately identifiable to readers at least, while the girls’ reactions to each era’s customs are priceless.

Here, for example, you will laugh loads at the Armageddon anti-climax that was the Millennium Bug, when Y2K doomsters warned you to switch off your computer before midnight on 31st December 2000, lest it explode or take control of your kettle or something. The actual turning of the millennium and century, a year later, was pretty much ignored.

Remember too that the young ladies are the products of their past, and that this is from the writer of EX MACHINA, SAGA etc, who’s not renowned for white-washing realities which some other authors would find awkward to tackle. One of these girls is a bigot. She is. She’s a victim of ‘80s AIDS scare-mongering along with other ill-informed societal bullshit and she takes it out on one of her friends. Some exceptionally deft and comical character-acting is on offer from Cliff Chiang there.

Also, the girls are going to be visiting their futures: not all of them are going to have made it there in one healthy piece. Others’ lives may also have taken unexpected, uncharacteristic turns. Would you want to know what happens to you?!

For more, please see previous PAPER GIRLS reviews, much more in depth. Cheers!

I enjoy Jack Kirby composition analyses and this cover, right, is no slouch. Unusually, there is no foreground, only mid-ground and background. The four paper dolls are caught mid-gesticulation before they thrust forward towards the inviting, intervening space: Captain America, Hawkeye, The Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, all in glowing, rich, complementary colours. Immediate action is implied in each. This leaves Goliath, behind them, in contrasting sky-blue and gold, not to dominate the whole but impress upon you his weight and comparative, sheer strength of scale, his thick arms fanning out to defend the whole of his cohorts with fists, the rising then bifurcating, central yellow stripe of his costume keeping the organic triangle in motion.

If only there were such sturdy Roman strength and reciprocal teamwork inside.

“Avengers Assemble! Mayday! Mayday!”
“It’s from Cap! He’s been imprisoned in a dungeon! Into your costume, Wanda… quickly!”
“Imprisoned, Pietro? By whom?”
“No time for that now!”

Or, you could have just answered: “The Swordsman”. It’s a little more informative, a lot less dismissive, and two seconds swifter to say.

Following the team’s earliest experiences in AVENGERS: EPIC COLLECTION VOL 1, our Avenging Assemblers by now consist of Hawkeye and siblings the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, led by a Captain America wrestling with self-doubt under the weight of responsibility and the isolation which comes of having been trapped an oceanic ice cube since WWII. He doesn’t have any mates outside of Avengers Mansion, you see. But then nor do any of the others because Stan hadn’t thought to write about them.

The Captain is desperate for some of the original members to return, the original members being The Wasp, Ant-Man, Iron Man, Thor and the Hulk. Yeah, he’s not so keen on the Hulk.

Good news cometh, however, as both the Wasp and Ant-Man return early on in this volume, the latter as the much enlarged Goliath in a blue and yellow costume which my child-eyes adored, the former in a swimsuit to resume her former career as professional prisoner / bait. With Hawkeye still envious of Captain America’s leadership, they’re bickering among themselves incessantly. It’s like Big Brother in muscular fancy dress, the Diary Room located somewhere in Steve Rogers’ head.

“Hello, Steve. How are you feeling today?”
“Hello, Big Brother. I’m feeling a bit low, to be honest. Hawkeye hates me. He’s keeps calling me Methuselah.”
“I bet he can’t spell that, and who knew he could read? Anyway, he’s only jealous.”
“Yes, I can read that much in his thought bubbles, but it’s demoralising when all he does in speech balloons is bitch, bitch, bitch. I think the Scarlet Witch has a crush on me. If Quicksilver found out, he’d skin me alive before I could even utter the word ‘incest’.”
“They are quite close, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, but we’re going to have to wait until Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s ULTIMATES for readers to realise that.”

“Steve, is there anything else you wish to discuss with Big Brother?”
“I still haven’t had my suitcase back. From 1944.”
“Big Brother is looking into that. Anything else?”
“Can I get a flag?”
“A flag…?”
“I’d like something to wave.”
“Why?”
“There could be Commies.”
“…”
*sobs*
“Thank you, Steve.”

What I’ve so far failed to mention is that amongst the household’s weekly tasks (in order to ensure a shopping budget big enough to keep Hank Pym / Ant-Man / Giant-Man / Multiple Identity Crisis Man in Temazepam) is getting Dr. Victor Von Doom struck off the medical practitioners’ list. His bedside manner is appalling, and I swear to God that unlike the above these are actual quotes:

“Here is a gold farthing for you, my boy! I, too, have known what it is to be… a cripple!”
“There is a great surgeon in the Zurich, across the border! He can cure our child! But he leaves for America soon!”
“We beg you, good master… open the dome, so we can bring our son the doctor before it is too late!”
“Impossible! It must remain sealed… until the four enemies of Latveria have been disposed of!”
“But what of the boy…?”
“Silence! This audience has ended!”

You’d ask for a second opinion, wouldn’t you?

Frankly, I have no idea how Doctor Doom’s surgery remains open: he’s not exactly renowned for his patience or patient care, and his prescriptions are unorthodox to say the least.

It’s all enormous fun, of course, as are the appliances of sciences: World-Wide Scanner-Scopes, Protecto-Shields, Vibra-Rays, Spectro-Waves, Visi-Projectors, Giant Plastithene Domes and a Temporal Assimilator which means it’s only taken you a tenth of the time to read this than I wasted in writing it.

However, hope lies high on the horizon in the second half, both for the team’s cohesion upon Goliath’s return, and for readers’ more rounded socio-political nurturing.

“Beware of the man who sets you against your neighbour!”
“For, whenever the deadly poison of bigotry touches us, the flame of freedom will burn a little dimmer.”

Bravo!

In 1966 Stan Lee took a brief break from his own screaming stream-of-subconscious sexism to tackle racism instead, and did so with bold, unequivocal directness and robust language which I commend without one iota of irony. In AVENGERS #32 and 33 he introduced the Sons of the Serpent, Marvel’s version of the Ku Klux Klan, seen here spitting their white supremacist venom out to a crowd which laps it so deliriously up:

“Our enemies must know we will show them no mercy! As the original serpent drove Adam and Eve from Eden… so shall we drive all foreigners from the land!”

Err, no really, that was God. The serpent poisoned the mind of innocents – and with that double whammy we’ll notch the scene up to a Serendipitous Stan because these are racists, so they’re inherently stupid.

Coming back to the commendable directness there’s another scene in which the hate-mongering tosspots set about ethnically cleansing a section of the city by beating the living crap out of a man while successfully intimidating neighbours into doing absolutely nothing:

“We warned you not to move into this neighbourhood!”
“But it’s a free country! I’m a law-abiding citizen! You have no right –“
“You dare speak to us of rights? You – who were not even born here!”

Up above:

“Henry! What’s the commotion outside the window?”
“It’s the Sons of the Serpent! They’ve cornered Mr. Gonzales! We – we have to do something –!”
“No! Come away from there! It’s dangerous to get involved! It’s none of our business!”

Well, isn’t that so often the way? Lest some of his readers learn the wrong lesson (bear in mind a lot of them were young and impressionable), Stan takes a moment to emphatically sneer at the couple’s cowardice:

“Thus we take our leave of Henry and his wife – two less-than-admirable citizens who feared to get involved…”

Again, bravo! This is, after all, a book about getting “involved” – that’s what the Avengers do – and they’re not slow off the mark voicing their own disgust after Goliath catches the bigots attacking Bill Foster, who’s black, outside his lab. I think that may be the first appearance of Bill Foster (he went on to become one of several Goliaths himself), and it’s certainly Steve Rogers’ first trip to the S.H.I.E.L.D. H.Q. which was buried under a barber’s shop. This is also the era when Hercules signed up as an Avenger and former Soviet spy Black Widow signed up to S.H.I.E.L.D. having spectacularly failed to win anyone other than old flame Hawkeye’s trust with the Avengers. Meanwhile Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch have lost their powers but Stan The Man has lost none of his way with women. The Wasp speaks last:

“If you wish to see Captain America alive once more, you are to follow these instructions to the letter! You will report to the next meeting of the Sons Of The Serpent, at the following address – “
“They can bet on it – we’ll be there!”
“I’d like to see someone try to keep me away!”
“Oh dear! I haven’t a thing to wear!”

From Lone Mountain (£16-99, Drawn & Quarterly) by John Porcellino.

Yet it’s not without its moments of comedy, especially where insight’s involved.

“One day Diogenes was sorting through a pile of bones…
“Alexander the Great came along and asked him what he was doing…
“Diogenes said:”I’m searching for the bones of your father, but I can’t tell them apart from those of a slave.””

Porcellino gives Diogenes a couple of tattoos: an anchor on his right arm, a love heart on his left. You may think that whimsical. I think it’s perfect, both for Diogenes and for John.

Throughout these pure, direct and above all honest, mostly autobiographical short stories, John receives love from his wife Misun and his cat Maisie in a quiet, unfussy and far from cloying fashion, and he returns this adoration to Misun, Maisie and – with awe and appreciation – to the abundant wonder which he perceives all around him.

Light comes constantly under his appreciative gaze, during the day and at night and those hours of spectacle in between. The weather, as well: sunshine, wind, rain and snow. Sometimes he evokes them verbally, poetically; often he leaves his clean and precise pictures, already full of space, to do that instead. Breezes carry scents and he notes those too.

Foxes, skunks and squirrels are observed, sometimes sought after, and flora is cherished as much as fauna. He likes to list their Latin names. Sometimes he’ll simply tell you about a tree.

Porcellino also lists his ‘King-Cat Top 40’s, scattered with more tiny hearts, as a positive way of acknowledging and publicly appreciating anyone and anything that has brought him joy in the making of each semi-annual KING-CAT comic or during their intervening months: friends, music, pictures, books, places, sensations, more light, more nature, more moments, and memories too.

John is as likely to recall memories from many moons ago as he is to tell you more recent tales. They’re almost always dated, both the memories and their commitment to paper. Sometimes they’re pivotal moments, like his history with drinking (it wasn’t good; he stopped); sometimes they’re reflections that have since taken on new meaning to him along his journey.

“I’m looking for those winter evenings
“I’m looking for those autumn nights
”That warm light inside that tells you it’s safe
“I’m looking for that old feeling
“The going within
“The soft arms of fall”

Other times they’re brand-new discoveries, and it is quite the journey, both spiritually and geographically as John uproots himself, his wife and his cat to move house such vast distances that they take five full days of self-driving.

And that’s where the anchor comes in, because John needs anchors like Maisie and Misun and his Dad so desperately, and that’s where the love comes back too: giving this love and appreciation is John’s way of staying sane, of holding on hard to hope when the crushing adversity is so crippling at times that he cannot create.

You’re going to witness remarkably little of that in his comics – which is as extraordinarily restrained as the comics are controlled – but it’s ever so real as the notes in the back and the whole of his HOSPITAL SUITE make abundantly clear. Indeed, his very occasional allusions to his mental health within the body of KING-CAT itself cause him nothing but more grief and guilt. The one-page prologue, ‘Hippie Girl’, is highly unusual except in its retrospective self-recrimination at his anger after being ravaged by OCD (it was drawn last year, but occurred during this period circa 2006) emphasised by the love heart between “Hippie” and “Girl” and its direct, cut-through-the-bullshit, priority punchline:

Moving home is a double-edged sword for someone with John’s OCD as he explains succinctly in the back of his move early on here to San Francisco:

“OCD is a disease of familiarity. New surroundings, while fear-inducing at first, often-times relieved my symptoms – everything was fresh and hadn’t yet taken on a multi-layered patina of anxiety. So those early days in SF were open and free, and the creative spirit of the city inspired me.”

John also does a lot of walking to stave off or alleviate those symptoms, by day and at night, popping down alleys purely because he’s never done so before. I used to like to explore; so often I don’t make the time anymore.

Unfortunately two of his most solid anchors disappear during the course of this retrospective work, and there are eulogies of remembrance, of moments shared – yet more acknowledgement and appreciation – that are beautiful to behold.

As I say, KING-CAT is a very kind comic, very brave and very intimate. It’s never maudlin, but it is at times inevitably sad all the same, with a huge sense of loss as John searches for somewhere once more to call home. It’s not necessarily geographical, although that would help.

Anyway, I promised you comedy too, so let’s bow out on ‘Squirrel Acrobat’. Sorry I can’t supply you with John’s diagrams!

“SQUIRREL A is confronted by aggressive SQUIRREL B, on the power-line wire across the street.

“Finally, both squirrels have had enough. They race toward each other at high speed, in what appears to be an inevitable head-on collision. I watch in disbelief as, just before the moment of impact, SQUIRREL A suddenly spins upside down on the wire, runs past SQUIRREL B underneath, and jumps into a nearby tree.

“SQUIRREL B puts on the brakes and looks visibly confused.

“Leaves fall.”

Collects KING-CAT COMICS #62-68 (2003-2007), one and a half dozen extra pages of comics and just under a dozen pages of highly Illuminating, contextual notes plus a delicious, only partially used alternative, landscape KING-CAT cover.

What I Did h/c (£22-99, Fantagraphics) by Jason.

In life, there are Moments that Matter the Most, but so many of these crossroads can only be perceived while staring back down the road with the benefit of hindsight.

I pray you find most of them joyous because, if they are otherwise, the terrible truth is that retrospect can prove a very cruel mistress, in that although you can finally see what was once at stake, you are powerless to change your choice.

There aren’t many laughs in ‘Hey Wait…’, however. Instead, it is the single most affecting thing that I have ever read in comics.

I used to believe that to speak about it at all would ruin any reading of it for others, but it’s such an important, landmark work that I’m going to attempt it now, for the very first time, without reference to the exact moment or nature of the crossroads. And I’m going to do it with a little help from my dear friend Mark who, nearly two decades ago, succinctly wrote:

“The first half tells of a pair of friends during their childhood without any of the sub-Spielberg mawkishness that’s been endemic over the past couple of years. The second instalment is the aftermath of an occurrence and the distance between your initial belief in the world and the outcome.”

Young Bjorn and Jon stroll up to a front door with all the nonchalance they can muster. Bjorn looks back to make sure that they haven’t been spotted, and Jon rings the doorbell. Both their mouths crack to great big grins of childish glee as they scarper away in the full knowledge of how naughty they’ve been!

The door is answered by a baffled Creature From The Lost Lagoon.

What follows in Part One is a series of joyful, single-page vignettes, immaculately portraying exactly what life was like for me as a relatively care-free six-year-old with my best mate, although I think these two are slightly older.

Firstly, “Can Bjorn come out to play?”

Then buying sweets from the corner shop with what little pocket money you have; maybe sharing or swapping some. Ludicrously unsubstantiated gossip spread in the playground (“How do you know?” “Heard it from someone.”). Territorial teenagers forbidding you passage down an alley, then telling you a sex-joke you don’t understand: of course they look like impossibly old, wizened men to you! Fumbling the ball in gym class, the ball being passed by a girl you maybe fancied; spying her in the park later on, then hiding, embarrassed. Asking your friend if they think she is pretty – he’s not sure, either; he has no terms of reference – agreeing instead on who was the best-ever artist on Batman! Now that’s Terra Firma!

Perhaps you created a secret society with a dedicated den? We did! You’d have to pass some sort of initiation test to join in. Then members would have to learn code words etcetera in order to gain access to the shack! It was idyllic: just the two of you, always together, even whenever apart!

Part Two is otherwise.

***

The second offering is ‘Sshhhh!’, a completely different beast but one that more recent Jason fans will find far more familiar: surreal, absurd, funny and ridiculous, but equally imaginative in different ways. Nothing is predictable, anything can happen.

For a start there are nine silent chapters of varying length, during each of which the same man leads his parallel love lives in differing directions, is the object of affection / rejection or, in at least one instance, has multiple walk-on parts in another woman’s love life. Sometimes with a gun; or a fist; or simply as a desperate daydream at the very last minute – basically, she wishes she’d gone with him, not the hunk. They aren’t contiguous chapters, is what I’m trying to say: the story reboots after each, but it will end, more or less, where it began.

In the first, a man plays a flute, busking for money. He earns a single coin, tossing it from thumb to palm: life is a game of chance? He spends it on a hot dog which he eats on a park bench before retiring alone to his nest. (Note: this is the only instance that I can recall in which any of Jason’s anthropomorphic birds spend any time in a nest – they live in houses. I don’t think this implies homelessness. Given how the whole of ‘Sshhhh!’ ends, I reckon it represents freedom from the daily grind and romantic rat race. But I am obtuse, so do please forgive if I’m wrong. All interpretations are surely valid.)

Anyway, he sure is lonely and after a snooze he spies several other occupants of the park being romantically involved. He retires mournfully to the park bridge, alone, and drops a stone idly into the water. SPLASH! And a woman appears right beside him. They look meaningfully into each others’ eyes as a vulture looks down on them through a telescope from an old castle turret…

Their romance blossoms, but a nest seems not enough, so they rent a flat. He attends a job interview to pay for the flat and their groceries. He begins sorting mail, she begins buying groceries. Nice little visual reflection of each others’ cubby holes, there.

I’d remind you that all this is silent: Jason is extraordinarily communicative as well as economical in his storytelling.

Anyway, shit happens (thanks, vulture) and you fear for their future, but both you and they are given a most unexpected reprieve. After which, obviously, shit happens.

The man stands mournfully at the park bridge, alone, and drops a stone into the water – this time hopefully, in remembrance of what happened before. SPLASH!

Nothing happens, except that the autumnal leaves are blown from the trees.

So that’s chapter one.

In chapter two the same bloke is pursued by a skeleton.

You immediately jump to the conclusion that it’s the impassive shadow of death, stalking him at the bus stop, following him onto the bus, thence relentlessly home. He tries to outrun it on several occasions, but surely you can’t escape death? Haha! Actually, this too is a courtship. They end up in bed together. Death brings him breakfast in bed. Together they do the dishes, watch TV and they take turns in the toilet.

I’m not going to spoil it for you, for the climax is almost as laugh-out-loud funny as the aftermath. But pity poor Death! Hey, you have to move on…

There are seven more chapters.

***

So to ‘The Iron Wagon’, this time an adaptation of a 1909 Norwegian prose murder mystery unless Jason is having us on. One never quite knows.

It’s ever so clever, but I’ve lost my notes and am well past my deadline tonight.

Particularly sly is the sound-effect lettering when you first hear The Iron Wagon pass by. You don’t see The Iron Wagon: it’s a superstitious local legend, intimating that something awful is about to occur.

Something awful occurs.

But the second time you read this through after the final reveal, and look at the lettering again, you will smack your forehead in hindsight.

Please drink a bottle of Bourbon and so forget that you ever read this.

Kabul Disco vol 1: How I Managed Not To Get Abducted In Afghanistan (£14-99, Humanoids) by Nicolas Wild.

“Are you an alcoholic, Mr Wild?
“If not, you soon will be.”

Guy Delisle fans of the overseas absurd are going to lap this up! It’s an autobiographical scream from start to finish.

And I do mean finish, for on his bizarrely circuitous way back to France – having managed to not get abducted in Afghanistan – Nicolas Wild stops off in Dubai, then Moscow where he discovers a souvenir shop selling Soviet propaganda posters from the 1930s.

“How much for the ‘Death To Capitalism’ poster?”
“350 roubles.”
“Can I pay in dollars?”
“Of course.”

Indeed Guy Delisle was so enamoured that he wrote its introduction. It’s pretty effervescent.

Coming from the critically acclaimed creator of the similarly wit-ridden travelogues PYONGYANG, SHENZHEN, BURMA CHRONICLES, JERUSALEM (as well as HOSTAGE), that is the most massive endorsement, and I’d also recommend this heartily to those who’ve enjoyed Riad Sattouf’s ARAB OF THE FUTURE VOL 1 and VOL 2 and Brigitte Findakly & Lewis Trondheim’s POPPIES OF IRAQ, all of which manage to incorporate warm-hearted humour while they explore the customs of their countries of origin or migration.

The sly difference is that Wild goes one comedic step further to mess with our minds with a few minor, mischievous embellishments. That they’re embellishments will be clear either during or immediately after their deployment, but each serves to make exceptional salient, satirical points to make you stop and think. Otherwise, all of this happened, and I love to learn loads from first-hand accounts which humanise and bring much closer to home what can otherwise seem like overly distant struggles being endured by others a long way away when, jeepers, we’re all human beings and every life matters.

As the comic kicks off, it’s early 2005 and Nicolas Wild has been crashing at the flat of fellow French cartoonist Boulet (NOTES: BORN TO BE A LARVE) without paying any rent or bills. The rent and bills become due. Wild is without money or inspiration (or, impending: a home) when what should pop into his in-box but an email offering him a full-paid job and a pad… in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Afghanistan in 2005 wasn’t the safest place in the world: they were still in the process of building their own army after their most recent war.

The gig is a couple of months’ contract with a private communications agency called Zendagui Media founded by two French folk, chain-smoking Valentin and perpetually skiing Edouard, who are in equal measures charming, disarming and infuriating; and Diego, an extreme adventurer from Argentina:

Nicolas is introduced to Tristan, the grumpy guy he’ll be joining along with Harun in creating a series of comics to educate the country’s population on its most recent Constitution and therefore their human rights. One of those rights is to a free education rather than illegally enforced child labour, but since 80% of Afghanistan’s population is effectively illiterate, they wouldn’t be able to read those rights and thereby acquire that education without comics. The medium of silent comics is an international language so perfect for this project. (See also: passenger airplanes’ laminated safety instruction cards and Ikea’s self-assembly range of Mission Impossibles.)

They have six weeks to create these comics from scratch, so no time to leave the office to make preparatory sketches. Edouard lends them his external hard drive full of photo references instead, but mostly they’re of him holidaying in Bamiyan, Salang and Wardak Province etc.

“I bet sending this hard drive to France would’ve cost less than flying us out to Kabul.”
“Dubai looks cool!”

Over the course of a nine-panel page Tristan explains to Nicolas and Harun another shortcut they can use via a graphics tablet:

“We’ll only draw each character three times: full-face, profile and three-quarter views. Then we can copy / paste them as much as we like.”
“Aren’t you afraid it’ll be obviously fake?”
“Nah. We’ll be clever, by flipping the image horizontally, for example.”
“That’s smart.”
“Or we can throw in a detail from time to time, to cover our tracks. Like hats for example…”

It was only when Tristan thinks, on the final panel, “I’ve got a cramp in my finger” that I realised he’d been pointing at the computer screen all the time; that he, Nicolas and Harun had been drawn in full-face, profile and three-quarter views from the start; that they had been copied and pasted throughout; that the image had indeed been flipped horizontally in one panel and – oh look – they’re now wearing hats!

They might just get away with it.

The Afghan Constitution is a pretty hefty tome and Tristan advises Nicolas to read it on his first night back at the guest house shared by all of Zendagui’s English-speaking expats. (“So what architectural style is this?” “Dunno. Soviet Swiss Chalet?”) They only get electricity every other day, the pipes have burst from the cold, and Nicolas’s bedroom is heated by a Bokhâri stove. It’s neither lit nor fuelled and there is an exquisite sequence, when the temperature drops to -15 degrees Celsius, as Nicolas searches his suitcase for some flammable paper, finds none, then spots the Afghan Constitution, glances as the stove, then eyes the Afghan Constitution again, desperately.

He should probably have got the guard to light it, using Kerosene.

Zendagui has 4 guards, 3 drivers, 2 cleaning ladies and 2 very enthusiastic cooks. For some reason there’s a boot and a spider in the fridge. Nicolas wakes up and takes to the terrace, wrapped in a blanket. There’s the melodious sound emanating from a mosque of Muslims being called to prayer… followed by the beating blades of five military helicopters.

“Goooooood morning, Afghanistan!!!”

Later you’re treated to a day in the life of a street in Kabul:

Early a.m. is for the herding of goats, holding up traffic.

Midday means buses and kids flying kites.

By mid-afternoon it is overrun by gun-mounted, armoured jeeps.

There are some seriously beautiful buildings on offer, but on the whole Wild’s cartooning is flamboyantly fun, some of the eyes reminding me of Simone Lia’s until a single page, after Zendagui’s communication skills have been commandeered to help the Afghan government recruit civilians for its army, and Nicolas is taking photos of men of all ages in training.

“Poor guys. To think that some of them will be sent to the front to fight the Taliban…”

The style shifts abruptly, haltingly into fully fledged, highly individualistic portraits, the last one looking quite young and more than a little worried.

Later it transpires that some of their claims, the lures being used on their recruitment posters, aren’t entirely true: wages aren’t being paid on time or in full for a start…

So equally my own claim that this was “an autobiographical scream from start to finish” isn’t entirely true, either, especially when one Clementina Cantoni, working for the Care International NGO helping Afghan widows to reintegrate into society, is kidnapped. Then a very sobering curtain comes down and a curfew is imposed as Nicolas Wild and his co-workers begin praying she is freed, start contributing to that campaign, and hope that they are not next. Diego announces that the company has gone to Security Level 2.

Wild provides a diagram (which I am about to translate for you!):

“Security Level 1
“Afghanistan’s a cool place. You can even go out in the streets to buy cigarettes.

“Security Level 2
“Yikes, the situation in the country’s kinda rough. I’d be better off staying at home and the sending the guard for cigarettes.

“Security Level 3
“We all stay at home and pray to God that nobody’s touched the Level 3 cigarette supply. The worse thing about all this is that, the higher the Security Level, the less you want to quit smoking.

“Security Level 4
“In theory, you should already have been repatriated to France. The tobacco shop was probably bombed anyway, and the guard’s been temporarily laid off.”

Sometimes you have to find your comedy where you can.

Things I learned:

Azerbaijan actually exists. Until now I had presumed it was merely an imagined Eddie Izzard punch-line. Apparently Timbuktu is real as well. My geography is appalling.

Azerbaijan seems almost identical to Bratislava, of which I have first-hand knowledge, in that its suburbs remain semi-Soviet and its population abrasive bordering on hostile.

Wild gets stuck there for a whole week while waiting for Kabul’s airport to be cleared of snow. So that’s something else I learned: Afghanistan is not perpetually arid. There is seasonal snow, and it globs gloriously across the page so that you can almost reach out and touch it. One woman wears ear muffs over her hijab. Why would you not?

Cell phones are a ubiquitous annoyance wherever you go, and your friends’ will go off at the precise moment you need to ask them an urgent question the most, possibly after you’ve just asked it.

The Afghan Constitution had a lot of less liberal predecessors. Its writers / rulers from 1964 are paraded in front of you in a history of revolving-door revenge and reprisal very similar to POPPIES OF IRAQ’s.

Religious self-flagellation is alive and well. Related: Muslims take and commemorate their Prophet’s suffering a lot more seriously and with a lot more sympathy than most Christians do theirs at Easter. It’s a long time since we carried wooden crosses down the street, but it’s not that many years since my last Easter Egg Hunt.

According to the Persian calendar, 2005 was actually the year 1483. This explains which the internet never worked in Afghanistan. Chairs are a lot less common there, making room for more floor space.

I already knew of the self-defeating stupidity surrounding America’s arming of various, successive opposing factions, but if you didn’t, it’s here, along with the astonishingly absurd way Afghan voting slips attempt to sell various candidates to a population, 80% of whom wouldn’t be able to identify them by name. You’ll have to buy the book.

Lastly, I learned how to surprise a “SUR-PRISE!!!” party. I hope one day to use it myself: that’s worth the price of admission alone.

Like INFIDEL, it is a terrifying ordeal which fuses the occult with real-world horrors like racism and, here, misogyny: the treatment of women as witches and bitches and cattle; to be burned, slaughtered, used and abused for sexual gratification, or as part of a serial killer’s pretentious art project. Okay, there may be another motive there too, but only “too” not “instead”.

“This is serious, Bridget. This weirdo can ruin us. He’s making a scene and we haven’t caught him yet. Why aren’t you annoyed about this? I’m annoyed about this. Be more annoyed about this.”
“You’re annoying me right now, does that count?”

Firstly, there is that deft dialogue, reprised a dozen or so pages later when the present-day Redlands-ruling trio of Roo, Alice and Bridget are called out to witness the attention-seeking murderer’s latest nasty little tableau of three dead, naked women on display, chosen to resemble each of them in turn.

“Alright, I’m annoyed now.”
“Welcome to the party.”

Secondly, do you suspect there is something that I haven’t told you? There is plenty that I haven’t told you. You should probably be getting used to that: I want to intrigue you to buy.

Although, here’s a hint: “This is serious, Bridget. This weirdo can ruin us.” Not, you will note, “This is serious, Bridget. All these women are being murdered.” (“On our watch,” optional.)

The opening chapter is set in Redlands, Florida, forty years earlier, at night.

It blasts like a furnace roaring into your face as a local police precinct, heavily manned, lies under siege from three women (unseen), while outside the base of a sizeable tree has begun to burn. The red-neck sheriff and his deputy son are bullish but already on the defensive. They all have shotguns. They also have a crowded jail down below full of we-don’t-like-your-sorts-around-here”. Their public lynching has apparently gone a little awry. Awwwwww.

What occurs next is vicious, startling and ever so cathartic if you happen to dislike bigots and bullies.

Forty years on, chapter two sees those same three women in charge of a Redlands rebuilt from its foundations up. But “in charge” in what capacity, exactly…? And why are they less concerned with the evisceration of women than they are of their own hegemony? When the dead ladies’ corpses are counted, DNA-sampled and found to be delinquents with no surviving family, they are relieved.

“It is good news, Alice. At least we don’t need to bother with concerned parents, notably the worst human creatures God could have created.”

It’s a surprising priority for law-enforcement ladies. But then they’re not really law enforcement.

Other surprises include that the main mysteries and histories and even alliances are not going to be what you will at first suspect. This is no linear, A to B to C tale at all. I promise you startling developments, abrupt forks in the road, diversions aplenty, sub-plots galore, and even more fire before we’re finished!

The first chapter’s colours are all old wood and fire, except for the cage below which is the sort of putrescent, dysentery green you might associate with equally crowded, below-decks slave holds. There’s lots of lovely red in chapter two (roses, sacrificial blood, that sort of thing), while Miami at night is all kinds of lurid, clashing neon, inside and out.

Del Ray’s figures are fulsome and wholesome, except when they’re dead. Actually there are loads of different body forms but I liked that line, so it stays. She does emaciated very well too, but I liked the sense of weight, especially when being lifted, naked, from a deck, then dangled above a dozen leathery alligators lurking in the river. Don’t try that at home.

The clothes are heavily creased – I don’t iron, either – and largely loose as you’d expect at those temperatures, and there’s a grainy feel throughout, with lots of texture lines providing additional perspective and depth, or in Roo’s case, a sense of great age in spite of her tight skin and clear complexion.

She has long, spindly, claw-like hands and a daughter called Itsy who’s… (Don’t spoil the surprise, Stephen.)

But honestly, the dialogue:

“Why do I have to go? High school kids never stop talking. It’s the worst.”
“We do not choose our abilities, Alice. They choose us. Perhaps you enjoy listening to others – ”
“Stop talking.”

Stealthily they prowl across wetlands, through meadow valleys lush with summer-green trees, and over buzzing forest floors which prickle with humidity during daylight, then fall to dark, dank and dangerous at night.

The fabled island of Isola lies far, far away and, they say, is surrounded by vast stretches of water. It is also said that the souls of the dead reside there. But no one knows if it actually exists.

The cat and the captain have a long way to travel, without any guarantee that they’ll ever get there.

That’s one of the reasons. There are so many more.

This first issue opens on a night of natural indigo, high up on a mountain range commanding spectacular views which are obliterated by sheets of driving rain.

The soldier sits guard outside the tarpaulin tent in a Moebius hat, fur-trimmed cloak, leather boots and leggings. Her lance-like spear is struck, up-ended and so ready in the ground. Under the tarpaulin sleeps the adult tiger, but its rump and tail stick out the back, so the loyal soldier shelters its hind with her shawl.

A ssssss-ssssssound from one side attracts her attention, luring the Captain from her vigil. Repeated, she falls for its call, cautiously following it, bent-over under gnarled, twisted tree-trunks which look more like roots rising from the craggy terrain. And there sits a fox with eyes glowing gold, perched upon what…? A stone seat upon a stone pole? There are others. Did they once house a feral parliament or perhaps a raised rail?

She follows the fox down into a major brook and the colours shift subtly, introducing more than a hint of lambent green. And there lies her charge: the tiger, shot dead on the river-bank with a flash-flurry of arrows.

“No! No! This is all my fault!”

“Yyyyyyessssss” the sound seems to say, backwards, upside down.

“I’ll kill you for this! You hear me?”

Then the tiger disappears… The arrows disappear… And she’s left standing all alone in the water.

Hello! How are you doing? This is terrific!

Don’t worry, come morning, the big cat rises from the tent and braces itself against itself, stretching its back/spine and sinews under the more golden glow of an early dawn.

It leaps up the rocks to gain the best vantage point and take in the lie – and so lay – of the land. But it looks back. Back to an island from whose distant, highest peak rises a dark plume of dense, ugly smoke in front of the breath-taking aurora.

And it laments.

It doesn’t speak – this creature cannot speak – but it laments. It’s all evident in its ever so suggestive but underplayed body language.

Time and again, I’ve written about artist Sean Phillips as an exceptional character actor (most recently in KILL OR BE KILLED and THE FADE OUT reviews), and that’s what our best comicbook artists are. Karl Keschl does the same here for the feline, and it is done with quiet and controlled dignity but also decisiveness as befits the tiger’s true nature.

Like me, you too will be bursting with delirious conjecture yourselves. That’s exactly how it should be. This is both exquisitely beautiful and so supremely well judged, not least for throwing you in half-way through chapter two without a clue as to what has transpired so far. You are now embarked – and so invested – with the captain and the cat on their journey.

Neat trick #1: I love the luminous glow of the tiger’s inverse stripes once the sun hits their spots. But only then, for the lighting and shadow do so much to illuminate the big cat’s muscular form. There is a degree of tranquillity and calm which others would have jettisoned in favour of spectacle and show.

Neat trick #2: they’re a party of two, but only one of them can speak. This is pretty brave storytelling, and it is impressively successful. The Captain can only infer from the cat’s cool, calm but occasionally halting stares and glares, how she / he / it is reacting to what’s thrust against them. Nor can the captain know for sure that what she suggests is fully understood, though I think it is.

You will encounter others on your way, for they will encounter others on their way.

The Goat Getters h/c (£44-99, IDW) by Eddie Campbell.

This is enormous and I am such a slow reader that I cannot possibly do more than present you with the publisher blurb. I just can’t. It would take me over a month to read this anyway, which would leave you four weeks with no reviews.

“With more than 500 period cartoons, THE GOAT GETTERS illustrates how comics were developed by such luminaries as Rube Goldberg, Tad Dorgan, and George Herriman in the sports and lurid crime pages of the daily newspaper. This wild bunch of West Coast-based cartoonists established the dynamic anatomy and bold, tough style that continue to influence comics today, as well as their own goofy slang that enriched the popular lexicon. The Goats Getters also captures early twentieth century-history through the lens of the newspaper comics: the landmark 1910 boxing match in Reno, Nevada between Jim Jeffries, the ‘Great White Hope,’ and Jack Johnson, the first African-American heavyweight champion; the nationwide race riots that followed; the San Francisco graft trials that culminated in the shooting of the Federal Prosecutor; and the trial of Harry Thaw for the murder of architect Stanford White, a crime of passion that centered on Thaw’s wife, show-girl Evelyn Nesbitt Thaw-all were venerated or vilified by Nell Brinkley, Jimmy Swinnerton, and their fellow directors of the ink and newsprint stage.”

“It is said that far from the world of man, lies a cruel and mysterious forest. It lures in lost travellers with the promise of safety, only to devour them for all eternity.”

We begin with a brief, animistic fable of a man and a woman who were indeed so enchanted, and discovered within the forest a majestic mansion which they decided to make their home. But dancing, singing shadows soon plagued the woman while “the roots played sinister melodies”. This divided the couple, for only the woman perceived the threat, and she was so terrified that she panicked and ran, to be swallowed whole by a “deep and thorny ravine”. Too late, the husband woke up to the reality of his situation and “collapsed, filled with guilt, and withered away at the centre of their home, unwilling to forget her.”

On the page, his hair becomes threaded with leafy shoots, sprouting from his skull, which break through the roof into branches, while below his feet sink deep into water, toes spreading down as roots in the soil.

“The trap had closed around them, like it had done to so many others. Their bodies were swallowed, their memories digested, and their identities consumed.”

Three boys have set out on a treasure hunt!

They wend their way across a mountain range’s meandering path, striding out east!

If you check the elaborate, ornate end-paper map, it might suggest to you that they should be heading north. You’ll quickly discover that you can follow their circuitous progress into the forest which promises the most extraordinary encounters ahead. Yup, those early broken branches are there, then all manner of strange birds and beasts.

Their leader is bursting with confidence! To be honest, he is bursting with a boastful confidence about his ability to navigate, eyes closed with self-satisfied pride. His superior route, his most ingenious shortcut, will have them safely back at the camp hours before anyone else!

His thick-hatted companion thinks their leader thick-headed, and is more than a little sceptical about his plotted course.

The third member of their party is the leader’s small, younger brother. He’s gaily jumping and thumping about, oblivious to everything, lost in a world of his own. He likes to make beeping-booping sounds. When you’re five, you can be a robot whenever you like.

Golly, how I love the leader’s intense eyes, fiercely studying his map, cheeks flushed with determination. He kind of reminds me of Philippa Rice’s portraits of Luke Pearson in SOPPY. That works so well in black and white, while in full colour the high-altitude track is satisfyingly smooth and flat in contrast to the sheer drops on both sides, as well as the trees which gradually begin to bloom then loom over them, their branches spreading like multi-coloured coral fronds.

I don’t know why – unlike Fléchais’ THE LITTLE RED WOLF – half of this is in colour, and half in rugged black and white, or why specific pages haven been chosen for the full-colour treatment. People have thought themselves into suppositional knots over Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If’, but personally I liked the suggestion that Anderson simply ran out of colour film. My guess in this instance is that Fléchais had some much fun with the forms and textures in black and white, while the full-colour flourishes are reserved for fantastical emphasis, as when the lads discover the corpse of a fallen stag in their path, wearing a bowler hat.

Some things should be left well alone.

Immediately afterwards (again, as foretold on our map), a bipedal fox in a smart white mackintosh introduces himself, apologising for intruding into “this sacred space”, and draws their attention to the trail of his bicycle which appears to have got away from him. The trail looks like a slithering tail and the fox is covered not in fur but the scales of a snake.

Now, how did that fable go?

One of my favourite episodes comes as rain starts to cascade down upon them, and they take shelter under a natural awning.

“What is your weirdo brother doing?”
“He thinks it’s his job as a super robot to hold the roots up.”

When you’re five, you hold up giant roots whenever you like.

It rang such a bell that I’m pretty sure I’ve done this myself.

You still have much more in store – as do our boys – all of it the stuff of dreams or nightmares as you burrow underground, or meet magical woodland beasties, knowing not which to follow, believe or firmly distance yourself from.

They even happen upon the couple’s now-empty mansion, into which nature has encroached in the form of fungi and branches and little white birds. Judging by the chandelier, the mansion’s on the electricity grid, which is unexpected. Don’t you think the tiled floor is ever so Bill Sienkiewicz? The lighting is too, streaming through the vast windows towering above them.

Von Spatz (£12-99, Drawn & Quarterly) by Anna Haifisch…

“2pm. Penguin service. I hate touching fish.
“One of the penguins wanted me to slap him with a herring.
“Earlier I saw a little yellow leg peeping from under the blanket.
“Is it possible that Spongebob is here?
“If I wasn’t drawing, I would live vicious and would be a danger to society. Thus, I’m drawing.”

Walt Disney is having a nervous breakdown which requires hospitalisation in a mental institution – sorry, recuperating mini-break – at the Von Spatz Rehab Centre, entirely populated by other sensitive, artistic types, such as Tomi Ungerer and Saul Steinberg. Both of whom, I will be perfectly honest, I needed to Google…

The fact that Walt seems to be imagining himself dispensing a fishy spanking to a penguin probably is the clincher that he’s not quite in his right mind. That he believes he has spied Spongebob Squarepants, hiding away depressed under a duvet, should be the giveaway that this is a not a real biographical chapter in the life of the pioneering animator.

I don’t know exactly what this is. I don’t know why Walt is portrayed with an enormous cowboy hat, either. I like it a lot though.

Anna Haifisch is definitely not all there, in the best possible tradition of celebrated comics obscurants like Michael STICKS ANGELICA, FOLK HERO DeForge and George GHOSTS, ETC. Wysol. In fact, if you are a fan of their gloriously incongruent, clashing colour palettes and determinedly unreconstructed illustration styles, you will love this work. It’s a real talent to make such unusual artwork seem perfectly normal and flow pleasingly across the eye, before then smashing your synapses to smithereens once lodged in the grey matter.

If your brain, like mine, is so inclined to allow such weirdness in, you will certainly find yourself delighted and perplexed in equal measure as Walt’s struggle to find his way back to normality becomes an increasingly surreal odyssey of testing artistic endeavours such as making a mini-comic and bemused, apathetic self-reflective commentary on his condition.

I also believe there is a wonderfully solipsistic aspect to the Von Spatz Clinic, if I have understood a certain clue and interpreted the ending correctly. Which I probably haven’t. It’s more likely I’m seeing something that isn’t there, like a pervy penguin, but I think I might be right. In any event, once Walt is sufficiently… recovered… to return to the real world and the Disney studios, is he prepared for what he will find…?

It Don’t Come Easy (£16-99, Drawn & Quarterly) by Dupuy & Berberian…

“What will it take to get Dupuy & Berberian the respect they deserve?” – Publisher’s Weekly.

A very valid question posed on the rear cover of this most recent collection of Monsieur Jean material which sees a shift away from the whimsical – well okay, whinging – story-telling of his dating disasters into a more serious, yet still frequently very amusing, exploration of his moderately disastrous long-term relationship with Cathy. Yes, believe it or not, Monsieur Jean is finally growing up! Mind you, the back cover does also features the following quote…

“A French version of an early Woody Allen film.” – NPR

Now, obviously, no one particularly wants to hear their name used in conjunction with Woody Allen these days, but it is a very apt analogy. For this work is all about the subtle interactions and emotional interplay between the characters, including inter-generational relationships as Jean finds himself all too frequently playing surrogate dad to his best mate (and mildly degenerate) Felix’s son Eugene, or Freddie Mercury as they persist on calling him, for reasons I never could quite puzzle out.

This work covers a good few years of Monsieur Jean material as eventually he makes an honest woman of Cathy and they have a daughter Julie, which of course, only serves to introduce a new chaotic element into Jean’s apparently relentlessly stressful life. As contemporary fiction goes, it is extremely well observed, feels completely real and minded me somewhat of Alex Robinson’s most recent work, OUR EXPANDING UNIVERSE for its frequently amusing take on the travails of a man fighting the loss of his bachelor lifestyle to the very bitter-sweet end.

Artistically, fans of Michael Rabagliati’s exceptional fictionalised autobiographical PAUL material really should check this out as this is very much on the same page stylistically. Plus, this is an all-colour work to boot!

It is exceptional value for money too as the final quarter features a huge selection of what are effectively two-page gag strips, each on a different topic. Some, I suspect, may well be excerpts which didn’t make it into the final script, purely for reasons of smooth editing of the primary storyline. Others are just out and out rib-ticklers. But they certainly make for a very funny set of ‘after the credits’ bonus scenes.

So, what will it take for Dupuy & Berberian to get the respect they deserve? Well, I’ve done my bit with this review. Now you need to do your bit by parting with your hard-earned cash!

The Book Case – An Emily Lime Mystery h/c (£10-99, David Fickling Books) by Dave Shelton.

“You survived your first day?”
“Oh, more or less, yes. The only problem is, I spent so long cleaning in the chemistry lab that I managed to miss dinner.”
“Well, that would explain why you survived.”

You won’t be so lucky come lunchtime, I’m afraid.

You can smell the stench coming off the pages. It hits Daphne “like a brick in a fetid sock” and that’s before what passes for the food has been served! You’re in for a merciless twelve pages of malodorous school dinner, described in such stomach-curdling detail that I strongly suggest you avoid eating immediately before reading chapter twenty-two, certainly not during it, and trust me when I tell you that you won’t want to risk anything for at least two hours afterwards.

As George suggests, it’s been Daphne’s first day at St Rita’s School for Spirited Girls, and that she survived Chemistry was nothing short of a minor miracle. Mrs Klinghoffer is as blind as a bat.

“Mrs Klinghoffer!”
“Yes, yes, child. Do not be worrying. Everything is being quite all right and I am being fine.” Mrs Klinghoffer raised her voice. “But if anyone is finding the fire extinguisher, then can they please be bringing it me so that I can be putting out my hair. Thank you.”

The long drive leading up to the school now boasts a substantial crater the size of a bomb blast. George explains:

“Chemistry experiment. Couple of girls messing about with stolen supplies. Mr. Klinghoffer was furious.”
“I’m not surprised! Were they all right?”
“Dunno. Nobody saw where they landed.”

George has a lot of explaining to do about St Rita’s School for Spirited Girls – not least, why he’s the only boy there. He doesn’t, nor does the author, which is exactly as it should be: far funnier to leave the oddity in this anarchic asylum for barely contained idiocy alone. It’s a private boarding school, by the way, during a time when trains still ran on steam, had porters to help you on board, and conductors with the power to throw you off – while in motion, apparently.

Whether or not it first appears so, every single scene here lies in service to the story – to the mystery itself – while other individual elements which you may initially imagine merely mined for their comedy gold will prove pivotal either to the unravelling of the crime or the unravelling of those caught in it. There is absolutely no fatty tissue (except served as meat), you won’t be subjected to every cross-country run, nor will you be sitting through every lesson. You’ll be out of your seat quite quickly during chemistry, either voluntarily or vertically propelled.

The only hours that may prove pointless are during detention. But then they usually are, aren’t they? Detention will be in Room 101, by the way, and at 4am. You’ve got to put some serious effort into being detained at 4am.

What’s so brilliant about this as an introductory case is that it’s a running comedic contrast between the naive and the new, so not knowing what to expect (us as readers, stumbling several miles in poor, bewildered Daphne’s shoes) and the blithely inured (George and Emily Lime). It’s all quite quotidian to them.

It seems we’re back in the dining hall. Do hold your breath.

“The younger girls were relatively subdued: loud and unruly, but mostly remaining seated and only occasionally indulging in petty acts of violence. The older girls, though, were wild. There were a number of minor food fights going on, one major fight with no food involved, and an improvised game of hockey using a bread roll as the ball. A chorus line of four sixth formers were dancing raucously on top of one table, which was annoying the girls trying to play poker beneath it.”

The very last thing you would want is to meet these miscreants on caffeine. You will, but you won’t want to again.

Every student and teacher seems on steroids. One of them is a nun who talks like a gangster. (She’s may well be a gangster.) Even Matron’s a force to be reckoned with. Actually, all school matrons are a force to be reckoned with.

“[She] possessed no shred of medical knowledge, training, or indeed sympathy, compassion or humanity. One of the less fanciful rumours about Matron was that she had only come to St Rita’s after her international wrestling career had come to a controversial end following the death of (depending on which version of the story you heard) an opponent, a referee or both. Certainly the force of her slap gave George no reason to disbelieve any of these theories.”

She has the touch. I’m not sure it’s a healing touch, but you certainly feel it.

“See?” said Matron to Emily Lime. “I told you he’d be fine. I am proper good at my job, you know. When I make someone better well, they stay well. Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever treated the same girl twice.”

As well as his immaculate comedy timing, (“The bus was old, dirty and noisy; the seats were old, dirty and uncomfortable; the driver was old, dirty and terrible at driving.”) I love Shelton’s descriptive playfulness. George’s hair is “enthusiastically berserk”, head girl Cynthia click-clacks in “important-sounding shoes” and Emily Lime’s face “seemed to be built from twitches”.

There are also plenty of linguistic flourishes (“An expanse of cloud blocked out the moon and the darkness deepened and bloomed…”) and a theatre to it all which is so infectious that I defy you not to want to act this out to yourself:

“Yes. You know: accounts. Money and arithmetic. Numbers and so on.” She pronounced the word numbers with a mixture of bafflement and disgust.

I tried ‘numbers’ with disgust my first time round, then added ‘bafflement’. Brilliant!

That’s the semi-titular Emily Lime herself (never just ‘Emily’, but ‘Emily Lime’), ultra-studious, ultra-serious, hardcore Assistant Librarian. Aged 13 or something. She’s just peevishly (and unnecessarily) interviewed our Daphne and now reluctantly offers her a contact. This is what I mean about comedic timing:

All of this is, as I’ve said, spun around a central mystery whose thread is sewn through each and every scene, whether you can see its narrative needle in action your first time through or not.

Daphne Blakeway has been offered a scholarship to St. Rita’s School for Spirited Girls. Which is a bit odd, since she didn’t even apply. Also, Daphne’s just been expelled from her own, local school because of an “incident”. No matter, the school’s librarian, Mrs Crump, believes that Daphne has qualities which may be of benefit St Rita’s.

So Daphne, although reluctant to leave home, sets off solo by train. But on the very first page the station’s porter passes her a book called ‘Scarlet Fury: A Smeeton Westerby Mystery’ by J. H. Buchanan’ which was handed to him by an unseen, older lady who was apparently en route to St. Rita’s herself, but thought Daphne could save her the bother. This is also a bit odd, because Daphne wasn’t wearing an A-sign saying “I am en route to St. Rita’s”. Perhaps it was her school uniform that gave this away… worn on the opposite side of the country.

On arrival, Daphne discovers that St Rita’s is severely dilapidated in the way that most fee-paying schools actually were back then, has the cheapest and most foul cuisine, lesson attendance on a voluntary basis, and a remarkably lackadaisical attitude towards Health & Safety.

What it does boast, however, is an extraordinarily vast library. Or at least, it boasts an extraordinarily vast array of library bookshelves, largely empty on account of most of the books having been burnt to a crisp during a recent fire, except for an almost complete run of ‘Smeeton Westerby Mysteries’. Only Daphne’s recently acquired copy is missing from that collection.

What. Even.

Things have already occurred. More events will take place. And they will do so in a thunderous, five-thousand-mile-an-hour stampede which will make you wonder how you could possibly read 300+ pages of addictive, so very satisfying Young Adult prose in fewer than five hours.

Bad Machinery vol 4: The Case Of The Lonely One s/c (£11-99, Oni) by John Allison.

“Is he your boyfriend now? Because pet food isn’t the only aisle in the supermarket.”

Some comedies are cleverer than others, and there are few out there who can spring from one sentence to another with such nimble dexterity as the UK’s John Allison who eschews the obvious cheap barb in favour of an unexpected epigram for life.

Allison is ever so good at observing and understanding the unspoken rules of school and young-teenage codes of practice over the last couple of decades. Then he’s ever so clever at transplanting them.

When new boy Lem arrives at the school gates, the girls hold back from tainting him with their company for fear that he’d be rejected by the boys, just as a fledgling bird might be rejected by its mother if handled too closely by humans.

“He’s wandering off.”
“He seeks the company of his own kind.”
“Are you sure we shouldn’t have spoken to him?”
“No! We’d have put the stink of girls on him. The boys would have rejected him. Pecked him to bits.”

He’s also very good at remembering our priorities, like Little Claire’s horror at the school-wide one-ply toilet-tissue travesty!

On top of all that John gives voice to our wider silliness at any age when sizing someone up at a glance. Parents are particularly funny, aren’t they?

“He was very polite on the phone. Sounded very handsome.”

It’s a brand-new school year at Griswalds Grammar in the town of Tackleford and our six young sleuths are in gleeful form. Together Shauna, Lottie, Mildred, Jack, Linton and Sonny are a force to be reckoned with, but almost immediately the most exuberant of them all, Lottie, is separated from the group.

First, she simply doodled over the memo she was supposed to sign to join the others in Latin class and so finds herself sitting instead next to Little Claire whose “lithp” makes her sound like a bothersome wasp.

Secondly, she’s the first to fall for the charms of that peculiar new boy Lem who doesn’t appear to others to have any charm at all: he eats onions and only onions all day! Yet one by one the mystery-fixated group comes to the improbable conclusion that “He’s a right laugh once you get to know him”. Then their breath starts to smell weird.

“I’ve blown up like a dead sheep in a river, Shauna.”
“I told you! Onions are a sometimes food!”

Effectively ostracised from her friends as they start being led by Lem to some very odd games at his onion farm, Shauna finds herself alone and in need of new, unlikely allies like Corky, Blossom and Tuan of the role playing club. Desperate times call for Desperate Measures and Shauna may have bitten off more than she can chew. But at least she’s not gnashing down on onions. Yet.

As ever, the body language on offer is exquisite, like Tuan gesticulating wildly over Corky, casting a

“Break Enchantment” spell, or one of the brand-new pages (there are always new pages upon printed publication) depicting team captain Linton on the soccer pitch in his pristine white kit, hands on hips as he wiggles the football beneath one boot. Judging by the various other stances, though, I’m not sure that it’s going to be the most coordinated of matches.

Blossom has a face like thunder throughout (“I never really thought of Blossom as a girl. More of an unhappy cloud.”), Lem’s nose is as raw as the onions he’s eating, and when someone shelters under an umbrella one gets a very real sense of huddling and what’s still getting wet.

The comic kicks off late at night and halfway in, as Shauna clack-clacks and huffs-huffs her way hurriedly down an eerie, empty school corridor which echoes like an indoor swimming pool. She turns to face her enemy… and betrayal from within!

Allison’s comics and comedy are ever so British and each one is self-contained so you can start anywhere you like. BAD MACHINERY VOL 3 which we made Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month is drenched in our national, default meteorological condition (the drains “GLUG GLUG GLUG” in the background here), while his self-published BOBBINS one-shot (another Page 45 CBOTM) was our biggest-selling comic of its year.

Lastly: What’s up with the word ‘lisp’, eh? Why would you invent a word which those who suffer from it find impossible to pronounce? You are monsters, all of you.

Mean Girls Club: Pink Dawn h/c (£14-99, Nobrow) by Ryan Heshka.

Page 45 has been with us now (At the Time of Typing) for twenty-three years and five months.

I was seven when we opened, obviously.

During that time I have, on average, enthusiastically presented some 50 shop-floor show-and-tells per week. You do the maths.

What happens is this: whenever someone asks for recommendations, if I’ve yet to become intimately acquainted with their taste in comics and memorised their credit card pin number, I ask them what they’ve already enjoyed in this medium or, if new to it, what they’ve adored in prose, television, cinema or interpretive dance. After considering their reply I whoosh round the shop like a seasoned contestant on Supermarket Sweep, snapping up between three and six comics or graphic novels tailored to their specific tastes, then proceed to show and tell them just enough about each to intrigue!

Miraculously, this illustration *is* from this book; the rest are not.

I know exactly which punchline to pull back on for maximum impact and the immediate induction of such seriously severe withdrawal symptoms that you’d think I’d mainlined them crack cocaine then kicked ‘em through a locked door whose only key lies in the depths of our till.

Did you do the maths…?

I’ve performed this task approximately 60,000 times. I am actually quite good at it, otherwise you wouldn’t have taken out your second mortgage (so sorry about that),”sexy” Jamie McKelvie wouldn’t have continued to read comics long enough to become one of this medium’s most lauded artists and dear Lenny Henry – an infinitely superior performer to me – wouldn’t keep popping back to Page 45 every time he’s on tour.

It’s an entirely understandable worry but a wee bit insulting: I don’t even spoil the first collection of a series when reviewing its fifth! I want to intrigue you to buy, not impress upon you how much I know.

I know this much: the art above is from the previous MEAN GIRLS CLUB comic.

In the spirit of which, however, (because it just happened to me again today, but hey, he bought the book in question anyway), I present you with a tweaked review of Ryan Heshka’s previousMEAN GIRLS CLUB anarchic away-day (still stocked!) while telling you zilch about this brand-new material.

You make think this lazy. And it is.

But there’s bugger-all interior art online for this book that I could have used to illustrate it with anyway. All bar one image is from the previous pamphlet. So I told you a story instead.

“These sisters are most emphatically doing it for themselves: self-examination, self-medication, on-the-spot diagnoses followed by auto-operations and even instant euthanasia, if you define euthanasia as putting someone else out of your misery.

The first collection of Marvel’s decade-old foray into outer space crash-lands on Earth, as Drax The Destroyer escapes from a space prison along with a shape-shifting Skrull and a couple of monstrous purple twins to cause a certain degree of upheaval in small-town Alaska. There Drax undergoes a bit of an evolution after he bumps into Cammi, a young girl with a fine line in pithy put-downs. She ends up accompanying him across the universe which is where the Annihilation saga properly kicks off. Nova himself gets a make-over when his base of operations is wiped out, and cautiously accepts Drax and Cammi as companions.

Mitch Breitweiser’s contribution to the first chapters (coloured to complementary perfection by Brian Reber) is an equally sturdy but grainy version of PLANETARY’s John Cassady, and Renato Arlem (coloured with well chose contrasts by June Chung) in no slouch in space, with a terrific sense of scale when the Silvered One surfs over a dirty-brown industrial planet or when the insatiable, drink-‘em-dry Devourer of Worlds comes to call.

Seriously, Mars Confectionary missed out on quite the trick when they failed to secure Galactus’s endorsement for the Milky Way, which he at least can eat between meals in its entirety without ruining his appetite.